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Conficker outbreak infects Leeds NHS servers

Servers on the network of NHS Leeds were struck down by the Conficker worm late last week. The malware infection struck on Friday and forced administrators to take a handful of infected servers offline, in phases, in order to apply deworming tools. Trust PCs were not infected by the attack, which a leaked memo (extract below) …

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some vaguely opinionated bloke
WTF?

Does anyone else think...

... that memo is just one or two steps away from being the body of a 419 email?

The "IT boss" in question is either employed for the "boss" part of his title rather than the "IT" part - or Leeds PCT employees are famous amongst their IT department for being blithering simpletons with no computer literacy between them.

Anonymous Coward
Pirate

These hospital super-bugs....

...can be hard to get rid of.

Anonymous Coward
Terminator

Not the only NHS trust infected...

its doing the rounds in the east midlands, lots of NHS PC's and Laptops that have failed the SP3 auto-update are still infested and keep reinfecting the home drive servers.

even with AV software installed they are still chasing down rogue pc's that need SP3 and AV updates installing.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Apt, somehow

but also very, very wrong. And unforgiveable. While windows on the desktop is no longer necessairy but still usance in backwaters like hospitals and other critical infrastructure, servers always could and should run something less easily infected. Why don't routers run windows? Because it makes no sense to do so and lots of sense not to do so; you don't need eyecandy there, you need it to work with high uptime and low failure rates. Same with servers. But that in turn means you need administrators that can do their thing without the eye candy. In other words, competent people. Whoops.

Dave Bell

Being a bit cynical...

I find it a little hard to believe that this can happen without affecting clinical systems or areas obvious to the public, such as outpatient appointments.

"Well, he would say that, wouldn't he."

(Paris just isn't in the same class.)

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
Reply Icon

That's because...

Outpatient appointments are still booked by fax in the some departments!

Anonymous Coward
Headmaster

Not a hospital

Dave Bell should learn the difference between NHS Leeds (a commissioning organisation that buys hospital and other health services on behalf of its population) and a hospital. One has in-patients and out-patients and does stuff to people. The other doesn't. Your homework is to work out which is which. Hint: http://www.leeds.nhs.uk/About-us

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