Posted on 11/23/2008 6:03:09 AM PST by SandRat
FORT HUACHUCA — For people who like to watch the post Commander’s Access Channel 97 on cable on and off the post, all that is currently available is a live feed from the Pentagon.
Local stories cannot be provided due to a Department of Defense-wide shutdown of USB ports on computers because of a global virus found on Department of Defense networks, fort spokeswoman Tanja Linton said.
“The Public Affairs Office is unable to upload or download video from other systems or our cameras,” she said Friday.
The problem began early last week. Network Enterprise Technology Command spokesman Gordon Van Vleet said that due to the security concerns about the problem, there isn’t much that can be publicly stated.
But attempts to degrade Department of Defense networks is ongoing by a number of sources, including recreational hackers, self-styled cyber vigilantes and groups with nationalistic or ideological agendas, he said.
“We are aware of the global virus, we have seen some of this on our networks, and are taking steps to identify and mitigate the virus,” Van Vleet said.
Noting there are millions of scans on the military’s global information grid every day, he said it is hard to say how the virus came about. But the military is taking actions to protect its networks.
Herald/Review senior reporter Bill Hess can be reached at 515-4615 or by e-mail at bill.hess@svherald.com.
It’s unbelievable but this policy has had a major impact on the way we do business. Is sure hope they find a way to fix the problem soon since we have taken two steps backward on the technology scale with this policy.
I hope the DOD finds a solution soon. It has made a big impact on productivity.
Everyone knows its the Chinese but the State Department (riddled with socialists, moasists, alternative lifestyle types) refuses to acknowledge the magnitude of the problem.
Hell, even the Obama campaign website was hacked by the ChiComs.
What happened is that people using flash drives on their unsecured laptops/home PC’s downloaded the virus which replicated itself to every drive on the system.
Now, they transport the flash drive to work/government computers and then that computer gets infected. If the computer is on a network, then the network gets infected.
So, this causes a big problem for IT guys.
I see a mandatory function where the flash drive is run through a spyware/virus review prior to the data being allowed to be transferred - each and every time it is used.
Is the military still running XP, or did they recently switch to Vista?
A mixed bag.
All the more reason to use Firewire (IEEE 1394) stuff.
Of course, there aren’t any IEEE 1394 flash drives. Oh, well...
All of our machines run an anti viri/spy software on them, so in theory there should not be a problem with this stuff getting on the DOD computers, but it does. I scanned over 200 usb drives last week. Several had infections but most were fine. I did see a trend, the ones that had been out of the country were more likely to be infected.
BTTT
What you didn't disable the USB hard drives. In our case it not only took out use of memory sticks, and external USB hard drives, it also took our our USB DVD-ROM Reader/Writer. Fortunatately our lastest computers, new within the year, have an internal DVD-ROM as well, and we can limp along. Although having two was better, because we copy a lot of CD and DVD ROMs.
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