The council was unable to illegally issue parking fines? Oh no!

They won't make a profit out of breaking the law!

(Bill of Rights Act 1689, section 6: No man may be penalised, have property seized or be subject to punishment until deemed guilty of a crime in a court of law by a jury of their peers).

-- Richard

Hey Mr Park is that your horse bolting down Manchester high street? I think it was using a bus lane but no worries there.

There's a post over at /. that talks about how these clean up costs should be factored into the TCO of using Windows but never are.

It's definitely something that Microsoft don't include in their figures when they spout their bullshit about Windows-based environments being cheaper to build, run and support than an equivalent *nix environment.

Whilst some of the Mancs' costs aren't directly attributed to IT, e.g. compensation for late payments, they simply wouldn't have been necessary at all if they didn't use Microsoft's OS.

Sure, you can say that the costs would have been avoided if the Windows administrators had done their job properly and had secured their network, but that's the trouble with Windows sysadmins... they're two-a-penny, and you get what you pay for. People whose only experience of computing is to run a Windows PC at home consider themselves to be Windows sysadmins. There's a reason why these people are comparatively cheaper than their *nix counterparts - because *nix guys tend to know what they're doing, and have the required skills and experience to do the job properly.

Group hug, anyone?

"Clean up costs and consultancy fees were a far more significant cost, resulting in costs estimated at £600k. In additional, council IT chiefs spent a further £600k on Wyse thin client terminals as part of an enhanced backup strategy.

Town hall chiefs also spent a further £169,000 on extra staff needed to handle a backlog of benefits claims. Compensation payments to benefit claimants piled on the financial pain.

"

Where securing the systems to not let this in. Would have cost no where near that.

Nice to know my tax is being spent well :D

Steve Park, Ex Head of ICT at Manchester city council.

..that conficker is a worm designed to fight evil? Houses of parliament (boo), traffic wardens (hiss) and an accidental strike on a hospital (perhaps it had something against the surgeon?)

I, for one, welcome our new (ok, old) evil-fighting worm. I wish I had windows so I too could become a zombie to fight evil.

Ill drink to that whoop

serves them right for being cnuts in the first place.

Having experienced the pain of dealing with MCC & their IT system, I'm not suprised.

The over all impression is that the entire operation runs on luck and the occasional defrag

"(Bill of Rights Act 1689, section 6: No man may be penalised, have property seized or be subject to punishment until deemed guilty of a crime in a court of law by a jury of their peers)."

Good luck with that next time you get a parking fine!

http://www.parking-appeals.gov.uk/about/circulars/Bill%20of%20Rights%20Act%201689.pdf

The 1689 Act is relevant, but there is no conflict between it and the

decriminalised parking scheme brought in by the Road Traffic Act 1991.

"Council chiefs have banned the use of memory sticks, which were blamed (extracts from memos here) for causing the infection, as well as disabling all USB ports in response to the incident."

Manchester City Council have not blocked s**t. I do IT for a company that works closely with them, and we are still blocking the mighty confiker one a thrice weekly basis, and do you know how we are getting it? Through a USB memory stick.

Its not hte end of the world, we quarantine and clean the stick automatically, but its only coming from MCC.

And do they take responsibility, or even care to have a look?

Paris as its nicer than Manchester.

"Manchester City Council was prevented from issuing hundreds of motoring penalty notices in time after the infamous Conficker worm knocked out parts of its IT systems."

Makes a nice change for a worm to have good effects. MCC can **** off with it's ridiculous parking rip offs and obvious underhanded corroboration with NCP. First all the places to park for free at night were made into Pay and Display if they weren't already, then the ones where it was free after 6 turned into free after 8, then not free at any time. Once that was done the NCP prices mysteriously started going up. Seriously - you are looking at around £7-£12 to park somewhere for 4 hours at 11pm at night in am empty car park? They can **** off. May they get repeatedly infected by worms.

"Council chiefs have banned the use of memory sticks, which were blamed (extracts from memos here) for causing the infection, as well as disabling all USB ports in response to the incident."

So, the USB sticks are to blame, not the hopelessly inadequate IT management?

Good to hear that they are safe now from any further malware incidents - after all they have banned USB sticks.

"council IT chiefs spent a further £600k on Wyse thin client terminals as part of an enhanced backup strategy"

I just love the way the cost of bolting the stable door is counted as part of the cost of the incident.

Beancounters - can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em damnit.

Buys a lot of thin clients, probably in the region of 1800 units!

Conficker did not go the surgeons. It mistook paediatrician for pederast again.

Age old problem, management not knowing arse from elbow and not taking heed of good practice/advice. Plus not wanting to upset users that want to browse the 'net, show off their photos to colleagues and/or to listen music. Oh yes and everyone's an expert with IT because they have a computer at home.

FAIL because they did.

Absolutely lovin dorks.

The ICT team was probably earmarked for handling UK ID cards too?

BTW: this brings up another favourite of mine...

UK local authorities should as part of their annual statements to the public declare additional unexpected costs or losses.

For example:

£9 million lost in credit crunch (something about only investing what one is prepared to lose? Iceland? Public muni?)

£1 million lost in breaches of employment law

£1.x million lost by one (note the ONE) computer virus infection

and so forth...

Now daft as it may seem to you or I, UK local authorities don't seem to realise losses from budget mean that public is not best served. Nor do they seem to realise that as recipients of public muni they should also be fully accountable even if it highlights employee incompetences.

Interim conclusion: MCC should be congratulated for its open accountancy and respect of the public and public muni (okay - that went to far but at least there appears to be one instance of accountability yes?)

I've worked with quite a few customer with various legacy NT apps etc that needed to run as administrator and often you find that actually they don't need to run as the actual administrator, they just need increased access to one or more areas of the hard disk; manually increasing the users access to these areas or files often resolves the problem without needing to go for a full blown admin account

If this doesn't work the easiest way to get around software which really needs to run as the administrator is to create shortcuts to it using the runas command http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490813.aspx

Neither solution is perfect but one usually does the job - hope they help if you're having this problem

Either way, having some pieces of software which need admins access so giving ALL users admin access and not locking down autorun on USB sticks is pretty poor (No Iain Thomas you don't need to fully disable the USB ports, you could even fully disable USB Thumb drives and still allow mice and keyboards to work)

I wonder if this level of council IT fail is why Manchester was selected for the ID card treatment? Presumably Jacqui waved the magic piece of plastic in front of the council chiefs' faces and was satisfied by the general response "ooh... shiny"

Nah its easy mate just edit the reg entry usbstor to 4 and that will disable all usb storage devices

Very usefull ....

but do remeber this will also disable usb cd drives (which new dells have for example)

but then again if your disabling thumb drives burnable cds prove just a big a issue tbh

Because they did not use combofix and they let their employee use their flash drives form home on their work computers.

PURE FAIL