Virus Infection Hits UK's Ministry of Defense, Including Warships

Retrovirus writes with a link to a Register story which says that the UK's "Ministry of Defence confirmed today that it has suffered virus infections which have shut down 'a small number' of MoD systems, most notably including admin networks aboard Royal Navy warships."

Re:Switching to Windows

[pejyel]

And it took hardly a month till they got infected...
FTA:

Since 6 Jan 09 the performance of the MOD IT systems in a number of areas was affected by a virus. Immediate action was taken to isolate the problem to stop the virus from spreading. This meant that some people were without regular IT access (i.e. email, internet). There have been no infections detected on any networks with sensitive information.

Is Fujitsu not to be held accountable

[Anonymous Coward]

I find this quite funny, 29 days into migration (rollout included) and the poor machines are already infected.

What is not so funny is that the MoD people are such muppets for taking that sort of decision on such critical systems!

Still a question remains. If the contract was given to Fujitsu should they not be held accountable as well, along with the MoD ?

Re:What happened to *nix ?

[Anonymous Coward]

well, hasn't windows struggled to be marketed as posix compliant exactly for this?

Re:What happened to *nix ?

[Yvanhoe]

You would be surprised to know that some crucial IT decisions in the MOD are taken by humans that can be competent soldiers but incompetent IT technicians. Or, simply, bribery-open people close to retirement.

deja vu

[lililalancia]

I was at a Linux Worldexpo in London several years ago when someone from the audience piped up about Windows on warships during the Great Linux Debate dinnertime session. I think he was a journalist from a Computing publication, but this was exactly the scenario he painted back then.

Re:Switching to Windows

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I hear that depends on which ship you're serving on. Some of them have these crazy computer systems, and they can't work out what's wrong.

Re:Switching to Windows

[Archangel Michael]

Sometimes, just sometimes, system admins are required to run things in spite of the fact that the systems are insecure. Typically, Sys Admins aren't the ones doing the system purchases or making the decisions on what systems to run. And sometimes, penny pinching tightwad beancounters make the decisions and those decisions don't include things like anti-virus, system backups and all the other things that would help mitigate against such problems.

Sometimes the idiots who you speak of aren't really idiots, just handcuffed by pointy haired bosses.