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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."

3 of 347 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Money well spent by gbjbaanb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Conficker.... suddenly it becomes clear. I know an organisation that was infected, and they ended up spending 2 weeks with a Microsoft consultant to clear everything up. The problem is that it spreads too quickly, so when you clear a PC and move on to the next, it re-infects the first one. Silly old Microsoft.

    So, if they upgraded their PCs too.... makes perfect sense. I wouldn't have binned the old ones though, I'd have wiped the HDDs and sold them or given them away.

  2. Re:Conficker???? by symbolset · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yesterday the Conficker Working Group saw 634 million HTTP hits on Conficker domains from 1.7 million unique IP addresses. This is seems to be a fairly static figure going on three years now.

    --
    Help stamp out iliturcy.
  3. Re:Far cheaper options by Pav · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Have you seen the work that came out of that? The GUI frontend to it all is called GOsa (although there's a fork called FusionDirectory which I prefer). The whole infrastructure is managed via LDAP plus RPC, and allows deployment of Linux and Windows (via FAI and OPSI respectively). There are also a multitude of plugins for managing a multitude of network services and LDAP stored info. I use it for managing DNS, DHCP, groupware (SOGo), web proxy + filtering (Squid), Samba, windows OS + software deployment (OPSI), Linux + software deployment (FAI), Debian/Ubuntu repo management, centralised logging (rSyslog)... and I'm currently looking into connecting it to Asterisk. There are TONS more plugins.