RailCorp has confirmed that some of its workstations had been infected with the Conficker virus, although it insisted that the virus had caused no operational impact.
(New Train Line... image
by Sailor Coruscant, CC2.0)
"Instances of the virus were detected on some workstations on various networks. However, there has been no wide scale outbreak," a spokesperson for the corporation told ZDNet.com.au.
The organisation's security and patching stance made sure that the "bulk" of its computing network wasn't susceptible to the virus, they continued.
The antivirus had also paid its way. "Instances where the virus was able to infect a machine were isolated and resulted in no loss of service to commuters or operational capacity for RailCorp," the spokesperson said.
Conficker uses an exploit in Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Server to gain access to machines. It spreads by either sending out remote procedure calls to other machines or via external devices such as USB.
There are a number of different forms of the virus. Crikey published a photo which showed an error message being displayed on a platform screen. It identified the virus as being the B variant.
According to Microsoft, it might cause services, such as Windows Update, to stop running and users might not be able to connect to websites that contain words such as "virus", "malware" or "Windows Update". The virus might also lock users out of their account.
RailCorp recently stood down its chief information officer Vicki Coleman amid allegations of dishonest or corrupt behaviour. Gary Pedersen was appointed as acting CIO.
Windows, when will they ever learn!!
Windows is for playing games therefore it is a toy OS.
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