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FBI, US Marshals Hit By Virus
Norsefire writes "The FBI and US Marshals were forced to shut down part of their computer network after being hit by a 'mystery virus.' FBI spokesman Mike Kortan said, 'We are evaluating a network issue on our external, unclassified network that's affecting several government agencies.' Nikki Credic, spokeswoman for the US Marshals, said that no data has been compromised but the type of virus and its origin is unknown."
"said that no data has been compromised but the type of virus and its origin is unknown."
How do they know that there was no data compromised if they don't even know the type of the virus?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
This claim is made by nearly every spokesperson for any major organization which is forced to disclose a malware attack to the public. In nearly every case the claim cannot be substantiated. Run of the mill malware often scans hard drives and uploads data to remote servers over encrypted connections. Most organizations have no way of knowing if these even happened. They don't know how long they have been infected. They don't know if the attack is directed at them, specifically (and thus might be smarter about hiding its activity). These folk really don't know yet what the extent of the damage is. The stock line should be, "we don't know", not, "nothing bad happened". Something bad happened -- malware got on your network and spread. That much is clear.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Correct, zero is a tad less than ~ninety-three thousand.
Considering that UNIX-like systems are ubiquitous in the server world (and OS X is a UNIX-variant), that is a really lame argument.
[citation needed]
Caveat Utilitor
Step 1: Ditch a closed-source product notorious for exploits and viruses
Step 2: Choose a better open-source alternative notorious for its security and stability
Step 3: close the source
Also, most mac users think and they're told that theres no malware and they're secure, so they have the mentality of "nothing can hit me" and even tho theres a few mac av's, almost noone runs them.
Hell, there's botnets running inside _routers_. What makes it think that mac is somehow some bulletproof solution. You dont need root to send spam or ddos either.
Mac is also a standardized os, so its a lot easier to make malware for it than the tons of different linux os's. And its already true, but because of this mentality Apple and Mac users have given to everyone, they think they're safe. It's really stupid from Apple's part, because the problem keeps just rising and one day it gets hit badly and no one has prepared because of their assumptions.
Trojans can run on any OS, once the user is tricked into installing them. IOW,they're extremely easy to avoid. However, viruses are only found in the wild on Windows systems. And only Windows can be infected by simply visiting a web site.
Caveat Utilitor
Step 4: watch a lower ranking employee click on the HappyFunTime executable in their mail
Step 5: Priceless.
Well exactly. What their spokeperson says doesn't necessarily have any correlation to what their head of IT thinks.
The spokesperson's job is to put the best spin on things. Saying "We lost loads of public data" would not be doing their job well.