Virus Shuts Down Australian Ambulance Dispatch Service

angry tapir writes "Computers which co-ordinate ambulances in NSW, Australia, are back online in three of the state's regions after a major virus forced staff to shut them down for more than 24 hours. The virus crept into the Ambulance Service of NSW's dispatch system, prompting staff to co-ordinate paramedics by telephone and handwritten notes. The cause and source of the virus are not yet known."

Comments

Re:I know what caused it

[gandhi_2]

I'm gonna take a guess at the cause:

letting mission-critical systems be used by employees to surf facebook and download cute fonts and wallpaper.

Re:I know what caused it

[antifoidulus]

Here's the thing about locking down Windows, it has the most pointlessly complex, convoluted security policies you could ever imagine. Something as simple as the firewall can be changed in 3 THREE different places on XP(no idea about future versions), and the way they interact and overrule each other is completely non-obvious. Now compare this with iptables, one text file, just one, and it's a text file. Boom, you have a functioning firewall and if someone needs a port opened/closed, it's just a vi command and /etc/init.d iptables reload away. I swear Microsoft makes their products pointlessly complex in order to maximize the number of people who take the MSCE test.