German ministry replaced brand new PCs infected with Conficker worm..........

TheKid7 · May 1, 2013

German ministry replaced brand new PCs infected with Conficker worm, rather than disinfect them:

If your computers become infected by malware, do you simply chuck them on the garbage heap and buy a new one?

I hope your answer would be no. After all, most malware infections can either be removed by decent anti-virus tools, or infected drives can be wiped clean and restored from a recent backup.

There really should be no need to dump the hardware entirely.

And yet, it has come to light that after computers at German teacher training institutes in Schwerin, Rostock and Greifswald became infected with the notorious Conficker worm in September 2010, 170 of them were disposed of and replaced with new equipment at the taxpayers' expense.

In all, the replacement of the infected computers (some of which were considered brand new), and subsequent restoration of data, cost 187,300 Euros...........
Click to expand...

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/05/01/german-replaced-pcs-conficker/

aztony · May 1, 2013

TheKid7 said:

German ministry replaced brand new PCs infected with Conficker worm, rather than disinfect them:

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/05/01/german-replaced-pcs-conficker/
Click to expand...

You can do that when spending someone else's money.

Nebulus · May 2, 2013

I think that a partial explanation can be found inside the article:

Just one employee at the Ministry of Education in Schwerin, Germany, was dealing with the Conficker outbreak, and there was heavy reliance upon external companies to backup and restore data, and install software on the new computers.
Click to expand...

Maybe they should realize that hiring more people in IT related jobs is not such a bad idea...

Wroll · May 2, 2013

Why throw and not simple wipe the hard drives? And why not donate them?

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German ministry replaced brand new PCs infected with Conficker worm..........

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