UK: Conficker Left Manchester Unable to Issue Traffic Tickets
John Leyden writes on The Register:
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.More here.
Drivers caught on camera driving in bus lanes escaped punishment after the town hall fine processing system was taken offline in February, following infection by the infamous worm. Failure to issue 1,609 tickets within the statutory limit of 28 days left the city £43,000 out of pocket.
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.
In total the incident cost the council an estimated £1.5m, the Manchester Evening News reports. Infection by the worm left council workers unable to send emails or print documents, and struggling with extra red tape after they were obliged to keep additional back-up paper records in case data was lost.
posted by Fergie @ 7/01/2009 05:24:00 PM
1 Comments:
"In additional, council IT chiefs spent a further £600k on Wyse thin client terminals as part of an enhanced backup strategy."
That's hilarious - sounds like the IT crew used a publicized incident to fulfill an item on their wishlist.
I'm not going to argue whether or not this might have enhanced some backup strategy in some manner or another - lord knows it's trivial to enforce a policy that data be written to remote storage if there is no local storage, but one would think there would exist ways to enforce a "remote data storage only" policy on whatever machines were already deployed.
I am a little disturbed that nearly half of the reported pricetag to repair the effects of this incident is associated with the utterly unnecessary thin client wishlist item.
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