“A new variant of a computer virus that has been around for years was the culprit that shut down courtroom operations in Houston’s Municipal Court and will keep them closed until at least Thursday, city officials said,” Dale Lezon and Dwight Silverman report for The Houston Chronicle.
“Officials initially had hoped that courtroom operations would resume this morning, but virus-detection applications did not identify the virus until Sunday, said Janis Benton, of the city’s information technology unit,” Lezon and Silverman report.
“The virus infected the computers on Wednesday, Benton said. Workers began cleaning the 475 infected computers on Monday, she said, and those not infected have been protected,” Lezon and Silverman report.
“Workers first thought the virus was Conficker, a super virus that has breached at least 10 million computers worldwide, including the government health department in New Zealand and defense systems in France,” Lezon and Silverman report. “On Monday, officials said the infection was from the virus family Virut, which has been around for several years. The city identifies the variant as W32/Virut.n.”
“Virut infects different types of files, including Web page files, screen-saver files and some program files. It also can download other malicious software. This particular version infects winlogon.exe, the part of Microsoft Windows that handles the login process,” Lezon and Silverman report. “The city has authorized a contract for up $25,000 to Gray Hat Research, a technology security company, to correct the problems. Benton said she doesn’t expect the remediation to exceed that.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This planet is packed chock-full of blooming idiots making piss-poor decisions.
