Conficker tomorrow

[Dominato3r]

Probably a hoax, but then again those recent job cuts didn't make Microsoft the nicest corporation on the block. Ive done some reading up, and it seems as if this virus was released before aswell

 

[sciwizam]

nm

 

[n0cmonkey]

The botnet's been around for a while (possible storm 3.0), but it's supposed to get harder to track today. Looking forward to it.

 

[Red Squirrel]

The IT manager mentioned a virus outbreak today at the hospital and I was like "oh greeeeaaaaat" until he mentioned to wash hands and stuff, then I was relieved.

We took preventative measures and it's been holding up. I'll be deploying the MS patch too to fix the RPC exploit. this should of been done first thing in the morning but all the politics behind it have slowed it down to tomorrow.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
The IT manager mentioned a virus outbreak today at the hospital and I was like "oh greeeeaaaaat" until he mentioned to wash hands and stuff, then I was relieved.

We took preventative measures and it's been holding up. I'll be deploying the MS patch too to fix the RPC exploit. this should of been done first thing in the morning but all the politics behind it have slowed it down to tomorrow.

You mean MS08-067?

 

[WobbleWobble]

I work at a hospital too (well, we manage a few hospitals actually) and it's not that easy to get patches approved.

There are older clinical systems that we can not afford to upgrade, that may not support XP SP2 and therefore not be updated easily. We too had to take many preventative measure to work around the fact that we could not patch certain systems immediately. We had to wait for the group and vendor that support that application to vet the update the update to SP2 or SP3 before we could apply the patch.

There are other factors as well. Updating to a service pack takes a while, then the other hot fixes are required as well. This could mean up to 2 hours of downtime per system which in a 24x7 operation isn't acceptable in the eyes of many. Update to the latest version of clinical software? You need to train the clinicians to use it. Plus, nurses, especially older ones don't want to learn since they think all they need to know is taking care of the patient. Computers aren't part of their job description. If you move an icon from the left to the right, they freak out and bombard our help desk. Which bring to me another point, we also need to make sure that we're well staffed and in a world of budget cuts and tons of bureaucracy, it's not easy.

While I personally felt that the media totally blew the April 1st, Conficker update out of proportion, I'm glad that it raised awareness at the mainstream level.

IT is simple. Politics isn't.

 

[blackangst1]

Company I work for faired OK this time around, so far. Just a handful of hits. Variant B is a different story. We had over 800 infections that time including laptops, desktops, and servers.

 

[n0cmonkey]

If you can't patch a system in a reasonable time frame, it shouldn't be networked with machines that can touch the internet.

 

[blackangst1]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
If you can't patch a system in a reasonable time frame, it shouldn't be networked with machines that can touch the internet.

I agree. But patching over 20,000 machines takes much resources hehe...luckily most of it is done via a radia push.