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German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection

Posted by Unknown on from the burn-it-with-fire dept.

An anonymous reader writes "German IT magazine Heise reports (original in German) that the Ministry of Education in Schwerin had a Conficker virus infection on 170 machines, that was dealt with by simply throwing them on the trash. Other German authorities have now decided that 'the approach taken is not up to the principle of efficiency and economy' and that the 187,300 Euro invested in this radical form of virus removal were inappropriate. The ministry had earlier estimated the cost of cleaning their desktops and servers by more conventional means to 130,000 Euro."

18 of 347 comments (clear)

  1. Far cheaper options by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Install Linux. Cost $0 + admins' time -- almost certainly less than trying to remove and clean infected systems.

    Forget about virus infections for the near future.

    1. Re:Far cheaper options by Cenan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Install Linux. Cost $0 + admins' time -- almost certainly less than trying to remove and clean infected systems.

      Forget about virus infections for the near future.

      They already had licenses to the Windows installations so the cost equation would be the same, it only differs if you assume they would try to clean the infection and not simply install Windows after format c:

      What the [admin's time] factor expands to is another thing, and hardly favors the GNU/Linux approach. If the idiots are dumb enough to throw out new PCs because of a virus infection, they most certainly are too dumb to install anything but Windows.

      --
      ... whatever ...
    2. Re:Far cheaper options by Nerdfest · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Apparently the Ministry of Education in Schwerin did not, and they're still dealing with the consequences.

    3. Re:Far cheaper options by longk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It really depends on the situation. Being Germany it's possible that all the average worker needs is SAPGUI, which doesn't really differently on Linux than it does on Windows.

    4. Re:Far cheaper options by Drakonblayde · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm sure a large part of the decision to toss em in the garbage was because someone wanted new gear. Can't forget about the political element to an IT infrastructure.

    5. Re:Far cheaper options by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's equally crap on both, you mean. SAP's UI is Satan's sick joke on humanity.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    6. Re:Far cheaper options by Ash+Vince · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Install Linux. Cost $0 + admins' time -- almost certainly less than trying to remove and clean infected systems.

      Forget about virus infections for the near future.

      Of course the admins time probably adds up to about $300 per machine.

      Seriously, I can completely believe this story because it would probably take someone at least an hour to clean the PC. It is also quite easy to believe that a government department or big company who outsourced their IT would be paying more per hour for technical staff than they would for a new PC.

      This is especially true if you asked the IT outsourcing company to provide a cast iron assurance that the virus was removed with some sort of penalty clause if their was a reinfection. The quote you would get back would be prohibitively expensive because the any company with any sense would run a mile from providing such a ridiculous guarantee.

      All of sudden what sounds like a 5 minute job to someone with some technical skills and has a 99% success rate has become such a headache to the bean counters that demanded a 100% success rate that they decide throwing the machines in the bin is actually cheaper. Of course this is ridiculous, but I have heard of things far more ridiculous when government middle management gets involved in IT decisions.

      In public sector management you hardly ever get rewarded for things coming in under budget like you do in the private sector but you get torn to shreds if anything ever goes wrong so the whole thing ends up being ridiculously risk averse in the extreme.

      --
      I dont read /. to RTFA, I read /. to offend people in ignorance.
    7. Re:Far cheaper options by RabidReindeer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ps. I doubt your secretary can tell which OS they're running in the first place

      Then you're an idiot. Just because someone doesn't understand technology doesn't mean they don't know when their menu items are in different places or when the nice obvious icon they had becomes some in-joke about Klingons.

      secretary: OK. so what do you mean that "this new ribbon bar is all you need"? Where'd my "print" menu go???

    8. Re:Far cheaper options by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Good luck finding a new maintainer for this cobbled together mess once you've left.

    9. Re:Far cheaper options by tepples · · Score: 3, Insightful

      How many of your claimed costs of education and of reduced productivity would be any different on, say, Windows 8?

    10. Re:Far cheaper options by war4peace · · Score: 3, Insightful

      all of your old apps from XP/Vista/7 will run on Windows 8.

      Are you sure?
      Yeah, many do run, but at what cost. There's a plethora of software which can't integrate at all with the Metro (or whatever it's called) functionality. Amazingly, in the tiled UI you can't even read what time it is, only the date. If you want to use Yahoo Messenger, you have to drop to Desktop mode. Daemon Tools? Desktop mode. Avast antivirus? Yeah, Desktop mode. Chrome, Firefox, Opera? Ever-the-fucking-desktop-mode! This is valid for a vast majority of existing (and popular!) Windows applications. And it's been what, 6+ months since Windows 8 got live and most popular application makers have no plans to create tiled apps for Windows 8. So much for 100% compatibility.

      Just as I hate having to use terminal on a Desktop Linux OS, I also hate having to drop to Desktop mode 10 times an hour to do the stuff I usually do. That makes the tiled side of Windows, no matter how colorful, useless and annoying. You switch to Desktop mode to use your browser, then back to Tiled mode to look for a setting, then back to Desktop mode to do this, then back to Tiled mode to check weather, then back... for fuck's sake. It's an OS with two GUIs. RE-TAR-DED.

      It is just an evolution of the Windows product line, not a radical departure from it.

      It is a half-baked piece of shit, and that comes from someone who used Windows since... well, 3.1 and tried hard to use Windows 8.

      --
      ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
  2. Money well spent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If its 130,000 euros to fix a virus infection and 187300 to upgrade AND fix the virus infection, then you may as well upgrade.

    The real problem here is the 130,000 euros to fix a virus infection.

    1. Re:Money well spent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No matter what OS you use (considering the OS licence is already paid)... How can the format of the drive + reinstall for 170 machines cost 130k$

      Quick estimate: IT guy is paid 100$/h (gross overestimate) and can reinstall 1 machine per hour (gross overestimate)... Total: 17k$

      How the fuck do they estimate 10x that???

  3. The cheap solution? by Mad-Bassist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why not use this as a way to teach the kids how to install the OS from scratch?

    --
    "The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games." - Eugene Jarvis
  4. 760 Euros per PC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yet the 'conventional' estimate was 760 euros per PC to fix it...

    I think its one of these cases where they're locked into a service contract for the PC they bought, and its easier to bring forward an upgrade than let the service company rip them off. The translation says they'd almost fully depreciated the PCs anyway, so they were several years old anyway.

    So now some party (no doubt connected to the service company) is kicking up a stink because they didn't get to rip them off.

    But it looks like the right thing to do, if the alternative was to spend 130k euros and next year spend 190k euros to replace them, and you've only got 30k left of right off, then better to save the 100k and move the upgrade forward.

    Oh, and warn your fellow government agencies against signing the rip-off maintenance contract.

  5. They ain't dumb by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If the idiots are dumb enough to throw out new PCs because of a virus infection, they most certainly are too dumb to install anything but Windows

    I don't think that they are dumb

    Actually, they are smart

    1. It ain't their money --- the money is from the gummint

    2. By throwing the thing away they save all the effort to reformat the disk and to re-install the Windows OS, plus softwares

    3. With the computer dumped, they will get to enjoy newer computers --- again, the money came from the gummint

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:They ain't dumb by bfandreas · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Actually this is a story about stupidity.
      They didn't have virus protection or anything security related. So the taxoffice watchdog told them to come forward with a security plan.

      This is just as stupid as it sounds. I've not heard if they were close to a Windows 7 induced hardware upgrade cycle anyway. But there is absolutely no excuse for having no security whatsoever.

      --
      20 minutes into the future
    2. Re:They ain't dumb by Culture20 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If they wanted new computers, they could have dumped or wiped the HDDs then auctioned the computers instead of just throwing them away.