Conficker Worm Cripples Police Department

The Conficker worm shut down the Manchester UK police station for 3 days earlier this month. It forced police officers to rely on other jurisdictions to access the country’s criminal data base as the Manchester station was disconnected from the UK Police National Computer Network. Investigators blame an infected USB stick for the incident. Endpoint security is fast becoming one of the most important and sought after security measures in organizations to prevent the spreading of viruses via USB ports.

          “Virus scanning has to extend beyond the PC to all types of removable storage”, Jason Holloway, Northern European sales manager with SanDisk said .”Better still, employees should only be able to use authorised flash drives that include on-board antivirus scanning. This ensures that users cant turn off, disable or work around the protection, and would stop these infections from spreading.”

Conficker has spread like wildfire across the net and has infected over 7 million computers. It was first spotted in 2008. Experts still aren’t sure what its purpose is since its botnet is seldom used.

A year ago Manchester council’s computers were attacked by Conficker, forcing the town to write off parking tickets and spend over $1 million pounds to fix the infection. It’s not yet known if the Manchester police will have to overlook any violations or void any arrests because of their infection.