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German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection
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."
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.
What would be the mountains of garbage and how empty the purse in this country, if that would make anyone like that? Schwerin Ministry of Education made with 170 virus-infected computers, leaving them short shrift unceremoniously throw in the trash. The State Court of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has carried out the initial purchase of 170 computers now reprimanded. "The approach taken is not up to the principle of efficiency and economy." € 187,300 cost of the new equipment and installation services to taxpayers.
The seemingly insurmountable pest, the computer of the teacher training institute (IQMV) in Schwerin, Rostock, Neubrandenburg and Greifswald was seized in September 2010, was the Conficker worm . In addition, the computer should have been more affected by some other viruses, such as the Ostsee-Zeitung reported first.
As the Court in its report criticizes for 2012, the Ministry of Education have had "no IT security concept" and established the new purchase with "faulty IT equipment". Further explanation and evidence remained the Ministry guilty. It "could [...] not state whether the IT systems of the IQMV were actually affected the extent mentioned above. Protocols of anti-virus software could only be provided for the location of Greifswald, despite repeated requests, which, however, no massive fund of was to remove viruses at the relevant time. "
In addition, the Department did not properly consider how costly cleaning the computer had actually been. The Ministry of Education guess the cost of cleaning initially to around 130,000 euros. The cost of 152,300 euros for an already registered for the fiscal years 2010/2011 published by new acquisition in a different light. The additional costs for installation were estimated at around 35,000 euros. Thus, the Ministry decided only to clean the affected server and otherwise replace all systems.
As the Court points out the country, the Ministry has now committed an IT security concept and develop "its supervisory task perceive so that an efficient and goal-oriented control and monitoring will be necessary." For since the Ministry has provided no "evidence of the actual damage and the causes for the occurrence of the damage," "should [...] be left open whether carried out by the complete replacement of the [computer] is a repetition of the damage is excluded http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fnewsticker%2Fmeldung%2FSchwerin-Virus-verseuchter-Rechner-Ab-auf-den-Muell-damit-1851718.html
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.
only in very few part of germany. Munich for example
And there is more to the story: It was estimated, that the cleaning of the PCs would cost ~135,000 €, and a replacement, which was planned anyway, would be 190,000 €, thus they decided to replace early instead of spending the 135,000 € on the clean-up and throw the PCs away a year later.
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
I guess they simply multiplied the cost of virus removal with the number of machines. But it only takes once to find the source of the problem, the remaining 169 machines could've been fixed at minimal cost after that. And of course, it doesn't cost a cent to just wipe them all clean.
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.
The traditional art of Dumpster diving plus a Windows or a Linux install would have saved these machines from their fate. If they were scheduled for replacement, then I'm sure some charity or educational establishment could have benefited.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
This happened in 2010.
Those were old computers.
They already had the money to buy replacements budgeted in their 2010/2011 budget.
So they had to decide to pull the effort the reimage everything for a couple of months, or just buy the new ones early. Buying the new ones early did cost a bit more (30k for all of them), but less then a cleaning would have cost.
The servers, who where not sheduled for replacement, were reimaged just fine.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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 !
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.
There a very few local municipals using Linux. Some are even moving away from Linux and back to Windows.
OSS is officially endorsed and favoured. But most of the stuff is still Windows.
Yeah, but it is Germany. In order to do IT work on a PC, you need to have a plumber and an electrician on standby and you are not allowed to do more than one PC at the same time...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
This "incident" happened in a state government (in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), not in the federal government.
Unfortunately, it's still very much alive and out there. The parents PC contracts it regularly (my dad has appalling security and browsing habits). A friend of mine (who I generally regard as more IT literate than I am) just spent a weekend cleaning an infection of it off his (fully-updated, Macafee-profected) Windows machine.
And now for a gratuitous side-rant:
The source of my friend's infection was apparently a minor video-hosting site carrying game-walkthroughs. On balance, I believe him on this, because I'd had warnings from AVG about such sites myself in the past.
The trend over the last few years has been for game-walkthroughs to shift from text-format to long sequences of videos. Personally, I hate, loathe and despise this trend from a convenience point of view (try searching 30 videos for how to find that pesky item you're missing, compared to doing a quick search on a text file). But it's had some other unpleasant side effects.
See by default, these videos go on youtube. Thing is, however, game publishers sometimes object to complete video walkthroughs of their games being hosted there and do DMCA takedowns. So the videos then crop up on less notable video-hosting sites. Many of which appear to be malware infested hellholes.
So the moral of my (horribly off-topic) side rant: video walkthroughs suck. They're difficult to search, they're inevitably narrated by some idiot called "Tad" who feels the need to say how stoned he is roughly every 30 seconds and - they're turning into a really horrible malware vector.
There's only so many times you can lather, rinse and repeat in a given time period before someone points out that you're insane.
Some folks might think I'm saying switch to Linux instead of just creating a fresh patch of systems to be virused. Smarter folks would realize that VMs with automated image rollouts would be a much better (and even OS agnostic) investment in the long run.
Is that PC hitting public facing stuff, or does it allow users to bring their own data? Then it should be hosted via VM then unless you're focusing on 3D graphics applications.
Next time they do a Hardware upgrade, you just roll out the VMs again and save virtually all the "support" cost of the rollout. Pays for itself after one or two upgrades. Doubly so if you've got a nasty malware infection since you already have the re-imaging process in place. With hardware supported virtualization standard now, it's kind of dumb to even not be using it...
The ministry of education of the federal state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern acted in the illustrated way. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is a small state in the north east of Germany. The central auditing authority of that state (Landesrechnungshof) recalculated the effort and determined that the cost of the early replacement due to a virus infection was too expensive considering the alternatives.
The German ministry of education is placed in Berlin (which is also a federal state having its own minitry of education) and called "Bundersministerium für Bildung und Forschung" (engl. Federal Ministry of Education and Research).
The original article is on the German federal state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which is a small state in the north east of Germany. It is not the central government in Berlin. I can understand if people find that confusing. However, there are 16 federal states. Every one of them has a ministry of education.
Furthermore, the German government replaced Windows for Linux in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but after the election of the present government, they changed it back, because they are conservative and neo-liberal and do not like this commie Linux stuff. Officially, they determined that the other Ministries were not able to share documentation, because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs used ODT and they used DOC. The fun fact here, ODT is mandatory for all government documentation (but obviously only on paper not in reality).
...how often do we get to make fun of Germany for making a boneheaded decision regarding technology? I say we savor this one for years to come, as stories like this are a dime a dozen over in the States.
The U.S. Government does this kind of thing on a regular basis. I personally have watched as hundreds of sets of socket wrenches and electronic devices ie. boom boxes, portable T.V.s and other brand new objects were thrown into the ocean, when I asked WTF? I was told the tools were cheaper to replace than ship them from Norfolk VA. to Jacksonville FL. When I asked why the boom boxes etc.I was told they were purchased for the ships store at overseas retailers and the paperwork would have been prohibitive because of having not paid taxes overseas. DEEP SIXXED in International waters. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
People do video walkthroughs because they're easily monetizable. I can make a video for a game and put it up on Youtube and get ad partner money. If I write a text walkthrough and put it on GameFAQs I'm pretty sure I get exactly $0 forever. If I try to host it myself and put ads on my site, it's likely no one will ever read it because people will just go to Youtube, GameFAQs, or the game's wikia site if it's popular enough to have one.
It sucks, but that's how it is. Expect more video walkthroughs in the future.
Now that would explain why Germans had this "cash for clunkers" program where they mandated that EVERY committed car had to be physically destroyed, instead of being shipped to Africa, where it could still have worked 20+ years. This has always struck me as incredibly selfish and petty, like some young child which would destroy its used toys rather than give them to other children.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.