Hospital Equipment Infected With Conficker

nandemoari writes "Recently, the Conficker/Downadup worm infected several hundred machines and critical medical equipment in an undisclosed number of US hospitals. The attacks were not widespread; however, Marcus Sachs, director of the SANS Internet Storm Center, told CNET News that it raises the awareness of what we would do if there were millions of computers infected in hospitals or in critical infrastructure locations. It's not clear how the devices (including heart monitors, MRI machines and PCs) got infected. Infected computers were running Windows NT and Windows 2000 in a local area network (LAN) that wasn't supposed to be Internet accessible, but the LAN was connected to one with direct Internet access. A patch was released by Microsoft last October that fixes the problem, but the computers infected were reportedly too old to be patched."

Comments

Well...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I guess that's the other meaning of "Nosocomial infection"...

bugs on hospital computers

[Cederic]

Suddenly I have this horrible urge to write a virus called "Swine Flu" that only attacks medical systems..

New Sources of SPAM!

[happy_place]

This SPAM was brought to you by a heart monitor!

Mabey it just wasn't a good time to upgrade?

[Chasmyr]

"Hi it says I need to upgrade my RAM, what is that?"... "RAM is a part of your computer, if you have more of it, you can expect it to run faster... tell me what your computer is running and I'll see if I can help you out."... "Uh, right now the computer is running Bob's heart and lungs for him."

Swine flu?

[Sockatume]

So, we have Conficker infecting hospitals now. And meanwhile, after Conficker's payload goes live, there's a massive outbreak of swine flu. And conficker spreads spam... spam is a pork product... COINCIDENCE?!