Employee infects council IT system

[elsiegee40]

A cautionary tale about a memory stick:

 

Computer virus cripples council’s work for weeks | News

 

Probably a bit of journalistic license, but still scary

[GrumbleDook]

I love articles like this ... whilst they do have a large point they fail to mention user fallibility, the fact that some of this £1/2m in costs is actually the existing wage bill of the people that fixed the issue, as well as the cost of wages of those staff who 'just could not work' ... forgetting that the people fixing the problem would be paid anyway and the people who couldn't access their IT finally had a chance to file the paperwork, clear the clutter and rubbish off their desks as well as do things like have a longer lunch hour and even head off home a tad early for a change.

 

Of course it is not a good thing that it happened, and is a sign of a stretch IT service but you would think that the world had ended. "Heads will roll", from a Councillor who is also an IT expert ... really? is that like you can become and IT expert by doing those learn at home courses enabling you to get a job in IT earning £35k? I am sure that this Councillor is been on PRINCE2 and ITIL courses, has perhaps read and can implement FITS, has a full understanding how to run and manage a system for several thousand users across tens or hundreds of sites.

 

I would like to ask him whether he thinks IT support in his schools is overstretched and at risk of virus attack too? And this is before I start on the journo too ...

 

[mattx]

I bet it was only a crappy word / Wazzu macro virus too.........

[superfletch]

It doesn't say what virus it was anywhere does it?

 

I'd bet it was Conficker - if so then the "IT Specialist" Councillor is right, heads should roll as this should have been patched ages ago.

 

I work for an LA and we had a few schools go down with Conficker this summer - not nice for them at all and gladly they are all back up okay now (a good test for disaster recovery procedures ).

 

However I can see how easy it can be for this kind of thing to happen on any network. Systems are very well patched and IT security is a high priority in our LA and schools all have their own autonomous LAN's.

 

I can imagine in some LA's there could still be a very real risk even when most systems are patched due to the number of laptops that go away with workers and take forever to pop back up on the network having had no security updates or patching in between.

 

The Journo says that in Private Enterprise someone would be sacked - the only reason this is different to Public Sector is because in Private Enterprise the Co would probably go under.