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Virus Knocks Out U.S. Visa Approval System
GillBates0 writes "According to this story and many others, the State Department's electronic system for checking every visa applicant for terrorist or criminal history failed worldwide late Tuesday because of a computer virus, leaving the U.S. government unable to issue visas. The virus crippled the department's Consular Lookout and Support System, known as CLASS, which contains, among others, names of at least 78,000 suspected terrorists. It was unclear which computer virus might have affected the system. But a separate message sent to embassies and consular offices late Tuesday warned that the Welchia virus had been detected in one facility. Welchia is an aggressive infection unleashed last month that exploits a software flaw in recent versions of Microsoft Windows."
Dang, just imagine how many people that is. Have they actually researched all those people? I am just baffled by the sheer number and really wonder how they came up with that list.
Use Adsense for Charity
maybe the US government could have better IT departments...
Instead of wasting time being completely down, take the time to patch these system (either with distributed patching or even individuals taking the time to patch EACH machine -- oh the horror).
It's much better than not being able to issue Visas or do any other work while you have to keep your PC powered down until it is certified clean by IT.
security professionals would still exist to protect users from their own stupidity.
According to a CNN article, the State Department shut down the network to prevent the spread of the virus. It was down from noon until 9PM on Tuesday. Shutting down a network on purpose is different from having it "fail" due to a virus.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Some day soon there will be a class action lawsuit against M$ regarless of their 'Hold Harmless Agreement' in the EULA.
And BTW, firwall WON'T in and of themselves stop this kind of attack. Sure firewalls are your first line of defense, but all it takes is someone that has a notebook that is infected from home, a business trip or somewhere ELSE to bring it as a 'trusted' device on your clean network and BOINK, you are infected internally.
What is a gov agency doing having open ports on their firewalls anyway?
Honestly issuing visa's is just way to importiant to trust to a closed OS with known security flaws, with at least one major one a month.
MS is so entrenched in the gov now that its kind of scary, that one day a order might come down to homeland security that some town is nothing but terrioriests and should be arrested, then taken to cuba. Meanwhile some hacker in the assend of the planet wiring a virus to gain entry to the gov systems is laughing his ass of at Ma and Pa being taken to a Marine base in another country.
"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein," - Joe Theisman
You don't put users and the servers inside the same firewall... do you?
Sorry -- I cannot think of a clever sig.
Paragraph 2: Car Safety. Answer is people keep getting bigger and bigger vehicles. Plus that number is mostly people who shouldn't have been in the gene pool anyway. Malaria. Don't live in a jungle. Cancer. Too bad we all get it. Stop smoking, stop fucking, stop eating bad foods. Easy.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
...why governments like Germany, etc, etc, are switching to either Linux or Unix. Windows is just one big gaping security hole. Windows is insecure. It has evolved from a single-user simple desktop on top of DOS to what we have today without much thought to security except for an easily circumvented login.
Unix (whatever your favorite flavor - Linux, Solaris, HPUX, even OSX etc, was designed from the ground up to work in a networked environment. That at least gives you a fighting chance of maintaining some level of security provided you or your MIS department set the system up right (like... dont use a default root password).
If Microsoft wants to save their market share, they should start looking into a Unix-type OS. Either port BSD (they have anyway in their TCPIP stacks) or buy someone out (um, SCO maybe - or maybe I'm psychic?).
Stop trying to push a derivitive of WinNT which came from MS OS/2 launched back in the late 80's.
Sorry to rant on so much and restate the obvious, but geez. How many times before people wise up. Every time some script kiddie throws together some crap and unleashes it, corporations and governments get clobbered.
Jail time for virus authors isnt going to solve the problem, it's time to attack it at the source: Windows.
It would be a lot harder for stuff like this to happen if they would:
- develop cross-platform applications
- use a variety of platforms
That doesn't replace having an adequate system in place for testing and installing the latest patches. It does, however, guarantee that slipping up and missing one patch won't stop you cold. It may slow your enterprise down, but stuff will still get done."Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
That may be fine but in some parts of this planet, people must travel to another country to get their visa to the USA. My wife is an immigrant and had to do this. Come back tomorrow is easier said than done. She had to go to Poland and stay at a hotel. Stay another night at the hotel? What about her airline tickets to return home? There is a lot of expense if the attitude is simply "Come back tomorrow" and what if the problem still exists tomorrow?
Doesn't the state department realize some people, other than themselves, have lives and expenses too? Why not take a system that important and apply both patches and anti-virus programs to it. Wouldn't that be a better solution for everybody?
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Some day soon there will be a class action lawsuit against M$ regarless of their 'Hold Harmless Agreement' in the EULA.
Actually, Business Week had an article about that a couple days ago, which I submitted last night (it was rejected). The author closed with (paraphrasing) "Maybe it's time some big customers refused to buy software without some sort of guarantee."
These last few worms and e-mail viruses seem to have become the collective last straw. The unwashed masses are finally beginning to grouse about buggy software-- the tide is slowly beginning to turn against onerous "no liability" EULAs coupled to expensive software that is critical to business.
A few years ago, Microsoft was very quick to whine that any delay in the release of Windows 98 forced on them by the government would hurt the U.S. economy and/or bring about the end of the world as we know it. Well, what about all these businesses who have to eat the costs of cleanup and lost productivity every time there's another Windows worm? Nooooo, that doesn't hurt the economy at all, does it?
~Philly
The software is bad enough; but the patch process is ridiculous.
If you could patch non-kernel portions of the OS without rebooting, it would be a lot easier on the average Windows admin who has to argue for downtime with the internal customers.
And while you're at it, let's not install every application in the OS every time.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Murder means work too. Are you willing to die a few years early so detectives, attorneys, and judges can have jobs?
I would really much rather design and build secure network systems than apply bandages to existing hopeless systems. If a system is available that resists viruses (like BSD or Linux), that might be a good place to start...
Oh, wait, I do have that job! And I bet I am having more fun than you. One thing is certain, my employer is not flushing as much money down the toilet as yours.
One day my job will be obsolete, but it will be because of self-healing, learning software, not software that was written 'perfectly.' Until that happens, however, we might spend our time trying to do things properly, and learning from our mistakes.
Nobody would support houses of mud and straw in the Northeast US just to keep a bunch of mud-slathering straw harvesters in jobs every time it rained. My house of stone, concrete, and wood requires maintenance on my part, and it has provided plenty of skilled, high-paying work to the local tradespeople in my city, as well as opportunities for me to learn valuable skills. Because of its construction, it also provides a safe place to sleep and run electrical wiring. But oh, the unemployed mud mixers! But when you think about it, who really wants to mix mud and straw for a living?
As for your economic 'theory,' read this, In short, it says that as an employee of the government, if you are talking about the US, you are advocating the continuous waste of my tax money so that you can remain employed. Please put that on your resume when you are out of work and apply for a job working for me!
Ok, good point pulling linux out of the box does not fix security problems, but correct configuration of a linux system WOULD prevent a lot of the threats that viruses present. Not to mention the fact that it would save them millions in licensing. The time it would take knowledgable techies to set up a linux based security system can't be much more than that of a Windows based system, and in the long run saves money. The real question is how can a government organization using tax money pay millions for software licenses for crap software...
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
I've about reached this point with the Swen worm. Since this past Saturday, about 80% of my email--home and office--is either the fake MS support announcement or message errors that tell me that my address was faked in trying to send Swen (got to be faked--I only run KMail on Linux). As my home email is dial-up (the pains of rural life) this is a real burden. Honest to God, are people really THAT STUPID? Until Microsloth can get it act together, we need to start blocking IE, Outlook, and Windows in general. Maybe then people would wise up and either fix there PCs or run a reliable OS.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
need I remind anyone that the 9/11 Terrorists all had Visa or Bogus Visa information. One of them even got stopped for a speeding ticket and had a bogus driver's license. Apparently they can forge or fake Visa information. So they don't need to go through our Visa system when they can steal a Visa or produce a fake one good enough to get through our system.
Either they need to patch their Windows servers and install a software firewall and keep their AntiVirus programs updated, or they need to get off of Windows and move to Linux or something that the Windows viruses won't run on.
How do we know that the virus didn't do something like pass certain Visa applications through without a security check? How do we know that Terrorists aren't using viruses to cause damage and bypass security in Visa checks? I heard that North Korea spends $3M USD a year to create viruses and trojans to attack various countries and systems. I wonder what other countries and organizations do this?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
A Microsoft Exchange mail server stores users' mail in a binary database, in a proprietary format. A Postfix or Qmail mail server stores users' mail in text files in a simple directory structure. We can make a reasonable (and correct!) prediction that in case of failure, it is easier to recover the content of mail from a Postfix or Qmail system than from Exchange. And, indeed, this is borne out by the experience of administrators: a maildir can get into an inconsistent state, but it's much easier to recover it than to recover an Exchange mail database.
Or at an even more basic level the difference between the Windows Registry which has everything from the critical to the trivial in one big binary lump and the "unix method" of having text config files.
It's just another reason why use of Microsoft Software when it comes to my finances and other personal information should be forbidden...
not allowing laptops isnt an option. some users need mobile connectivity as part of their work.
That's why firewalls are an overrated security device.
Any decently-large organization should assume that evil systems will make it onto the local network. Maybe a laptop is trojaned while it's at home. Maybe the janitor is bribed to leave a PDA in an unused jack behind a shelf. Or most likely, a regular employee wants to escalate her priviledges to make mischief (most "hacks" are insider jobs)
However the attack comes, you should be ready for it, by not giving locally-created network packets any special level of trust.
I've got Norton doing an update once daily on my home machine, and I still got the Blaster virus thanks to my not patching soon enough.
That's why virus-scanners are overrated as a security mechanism.
It's like protecting banks by checking a list of known criminals before letting someone in. Everyone gets to rob a bank at least once! Any determined attacker (as opposed to a random prankster) can have a custom, unrecognizable virus made before assaulting you.
Better than virus-scanning would be to change the unsafe behavior that exposes you to running untrusted code. Of course, that wouldn't help against Blaster much, because it's not a virus!.
Worms are different, and virus-scanners are even less well-suited to handle them.
"Did you read that article on politechbot.com that they wouldn't let some guy wearing a little button that read "Suspected terrorist" fly on an airplane?"
Some guy being John Gilmore:
http://freetotravel.org/terrorist.html
You're right: there are 300 million suspected terrorists. But their names don't need to be stored - they took a hint from verisign, and just used a wildcard.
Select * from americans where police_badge = NULL;