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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."
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.
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.
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 !
There a more than 1200 Linux viruses
Liar. There's something like < 100 viruses of which maybe 5 have ever been seen in the wild...
ps. I doubt your secretary can tell which OS they're running in the first place. And it's completely irrelevant too since the workflow is the same.
That actually reads pretty well, we should pass Timothy's posts through Google Translate in future.
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.
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.
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???
1200 viruses? I think you're exaggerating. Maybe you're counting some variants of the same "virus" - like several times each. I don't know the exact number, to be honest. I do know that I was repairing damage due to exploits on Windows monthly. When I switched to Linux, I stopped repairing computers, until hardware broke.
How many millions of viruses are available for Windows now? So few virus writers support Linux . . . *sigh*
Here's a number that will blow your mind:
"At day’s end on April 12, for example, Symantec published the summary shown below, noting that its latest Virus Definitions file contained 17,702,868 separate signatures."
Don't take my word for it - read the article!
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/the-malware-numbers-game-how-many-viruses-are-out-there/4783
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br