Parliamentary Network gets Confickered

By Davey Winder
Saturday, 28 March 2009 21:07

Home IT

With the much hyped Conficker payload day fast arriving, the last thing you want to hear is that the Parliamentary Network has been infected.

Conficker has already hit the Brits hard, with reports of infections within National Health Service hospital systems and even the Royal Navy Fleet.

Now it seems that the official House of Commons UK Parliamentary Network has also fallen victim to Conficker.

With the most recent Conficker variant expected to download an as yet unknown, but predicted to be botnet related, payload on April 1st, it would be no joke if a supposedly secure network such as that enjoyed by members of parliament were to be assimilated.

It looks like that will not happen, as the infection has been spotted and a major clean up operation would appear to be underway.

An email was distributed to all users connecting directly to the Parliamentary Network earlier this week, confirming that it had been "affected by a virus known as conficker."

That email from the UK Director of Parliamentary ICT stated that it was working "with our third party partners to manage its removal" and made plain the need to "act swiftly to clean computers that are infected."

The network has been scanned and the users of any equipment identified as being infected are being contacted directly in order to remove the device from the network and cleanse it of Conficker.

We understand that a temporary ban has been placed upon the use of removable mass storage devices such as MP3 players and memory sticks.

The email missive also mentions that infected devices, once cleansed, will be "loaded with the correct software to prevent this infection reoccurring."

Feel free to rearrange the following words: horse, bolted, door...