Septic Thumb Drive

The Register has reported that it cost Ealing Council, in London (UK) some £500,000 in lost revenue and repairs after a "virus infection" in May. According to El Reg’s John Leyden, the virus in question was Conficker-D, though because of differences in Conficker variant naming, it’s difficult to say exactly which variant that would refer to. Not that it matters very much at this point, I suppose.

According to the Guardian further costs to the Council include:

• 1,838 parking tickets cancelled (total cost of £90,000)
• libraries lost £25,000 in fines and booking fees
• an unspecified amount of council property rent went uncollected (presumably the council expects to catch up with this, but will obviously lose out on revenue in the short term)
• £14,000 spent on clearing housing benefit claims.

The cause of the infection has been traced back to a council employee who plugged an infected USB memory stick of some kind into a PC at work.

Now do you believe us when we tell you that you need to install the Microsoft patches that will stop Autorun executing from most USB devices?

David Harley BA CISSP FBCS CITP
Director of Malware Intelligence

ESET Threatblog (TinyURL with preview enabled): http://preview.tinyurl.com/esetblog
ESET Threatblog notifications on Twitter: http://twitter.com/esetresearch
ESET White Papers Page: http://www.eset.com/download/whitepapers.php

Securing Our eCity community initiative: http://www.securingourecity.org/