Slashdot Mirror
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."
How do you know they didn't, you dope?
How do you know it just didnt fail because the janitor tripped over the power cord, or because of a design flaw, and this is just par-for-the-course beurocratic finger-pointing?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Does the system really need remote logins though? How many databases are there out there that use various other interfaces to get to it. Seriously, something like this is going to be on a db server, with a front end app server. The db server should be locked down to only allow access from whatever method the app server uses to communitcate with the db server...that is it. I can see the app end being in some sort of DMZ, but I can't see why they do not have some sort of system image avail. for it to recover from something like this.