Virus Hits Federal Visa-Checking System

ABC News/Associated Press ^ | 9/24/03

[MineralMan]

Computer Virus Cripples State Department's Visa-Checking System for About Nine Hours

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON Sept. 24 — A computer virus disrupted systems at the State Department for checking every visa applicant for terrorist or criminal history, leaving the U.S. government unable to issue visas for roughly nine hours. The virus crippled the department's Consular Lookout and Support System, known as CLASS, which contains more than 15 million records from the FBI, the State Department and U.S. immigration, drug-enforcement and intelligence agencies. Among the names are those of at least 78,000 suspected terrorists.

In an internal message sent late Tuesday to embassies and consular offices worldwide, officials cautioned that "CLASS is down due to a virus found in the system." There was no backup system immediately available, and officials said they could not predict how long the outage might last.

[MineralMan]

Oops. Missed that security update, I guess....

[DittoJed2]

Note to homeland security: Lose the Microsoft products in the Government. Carry on.

[Madame Dufarge]

What amazes me is that they didn't just keep issuing the visas anyway.

[Nouge]

Note to homeland security: UPDATE the Microsoft products in the Government. Carry on.

[Dog]

Could someone have infected the CLASS system and be trying to get someone in the country while the system is down..

[DittoJed2]

On something as important as security, I say lose them. They are too open to viruses. You never hear of Apple or Linux or others going through this kinda stuff- but MS seems to go through it all the time.

[Dead Corpse]

Gah!!! My bank uses Visa for their Check Cards. The title threw me for a second.

[kevkrom]

As I pointed out on another thread, CLASS was unaffected by the virus (it's on a mainframe, not a Windows box). The network that CLASS resides on was temporarily shut down by the systems admins to prevent the virus from spreading until other affected systems could be cleaned.

[kevkrom]

Could someone have infected the CLASS system and be trying to get someone in the country while the system is down

No -- visas cannot be issued until the name check (among other things) has been completed.

[mle_ii]

On something as important as security, I say update your operating system with the fixes provided ASAP. The fix for this problem has been out for 2+ months now.

All OSes are vunerable to Viruses and Worms, not just Windows. Welchia is a worm by the way and not a virus.

The reason you don't hear about Linux/Unix or Apple going through this stuff is that the news doesn't think it's as news worthy to report the many flaws of Linux/Unix or Apple, that is unless you know where to look.

No OS is without it's flaws, any OS that has connections to the internet is going to be hacked at some point. No security measures are full proof as hackers are constantly finding new ways of getting into all OSes.

All OS companies can do is to make sure that their products are as secure as possible when they ship, and constantly improve on security by providing updates when needed.

[joesnuffy]

OOPS how many more terrorists just "slipped" through the system.....
Oh Oh better speed up constitutional erosion of individual rights...