We're well and deep into April 1 now, and if you were to believe some of the reports and hype on the internet, we should've all been paying in bottle caps right about now. As any sane person already saw coming, the Windows worm Conficker didn't do anything. It just kind of sat there, patiently mocking all those who did not update their machines properly.
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Member since:2009-04-02
I work as a web dev for the US Air Force and I can tell you exactly what the problem is; the whole chain of command issue. What I mean is that a guy like me has to put in a request for something and the request has to work it's way up the chain of command because the first person you asked won't give you an answer for fear of being chewed out by their superior for overstepping authority.
So up and up the request goes, and eventually, down it comes through the chain again once an answer has been given. This takes days, months, even YEARS in some cases. The IT guys in my detachment that I work with have been trying to get everyone to upgrade to IE7 and to delist Firefox as unstable for the work environment. They put that request in quite some time ago.. and I can still hear it crawling up the chain ever so slowly....
Member since:
2005-07-08
From the story:
Cheesh... Defence and army people should certainly know better. That is simply inexcusable from them, especially as the security hole was patched before the worm got out and all you had to do was to keep your machines up-to-date. And this is not the first time we read news like this.
Don't those people responsible for the critical army IT systems understand anything about secure computing? What if there was a serious accident with those weapons because of their lax and ignorant attitudes? What if a war broke out and the systems were expected to work? And why on earth don't they use computer systems that are well known to be much less vulnerable to malware? Too much corporate lobbing and pressure in the government and in the defence ministries?