Who needs anti-virus

[Rick Law]

According to the Inspector General’s report, EDA (Economic Development Agency) destroyed 2.7 million dollars worth of PC, mouse, keyboards, etc.   After EDA hiring a contractor to investigate possible malware infection in December 2011, they wanted a guarantee from the contractor that its computer system was infection-free and that no malware could persist.  The contractor cannot possibly guarantee that. 

“External incident responders were unable to provide the assurance EDA’s CIO sought, because doing so involved proving that an infection could not exist rather than that one did not exist,” the report said.

So they spend nearly a million building (renting?) temporary IT infrastructure and begin destroying the old potentially infected equipment.

The destroyed equipment includes:
- Desktop computers
- Printers
- TVs
- Cameras
- Mice
- Keyboards

They halted the destruction when they ran out of funding.  In the end, only six infected components were identified and according to the report, all easily fixable. But instead of taking that route, the EDA decided to physically destroy its hardware system.

Give you warm and fussies about your safety when our Homeland Security Dept (which runs EDA) has such smart guys working for them, doesn't it?

[c4757p]

they wanted a guarantee from the contractor that its computer system was infection-free and that no malware could persist.

[EEVblog]

Got a source for this news story?

[Rick Law]

Got a source for this news story?

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/07/10/us-agency-destroys-computers/?test=latestnews

[IanB]

Got a source for this news story?

It was all over the internet yesterday 

[BravoV]

All these fuss can be summarized in just simple one word : "corruption" , nothing to see here, move along. 

[Rick Law]

Got a source for this news story?

It was all over the internet yesterday 

I was busy for a day and look what happens...  I missed such fun story!

All these fuss can be summarized in just simple one word : "corruption" , nothing to see here, move along. 

More incompetent than corruption, I think.  This CIO thinks he/she can get an assurance that his/her machines cannot get inflected.  That is like asking the doctor to assure that you will not get a cold.  To destroy a mouse?  TV?  My goodness.  And this from the CIO!  Geeze, who are they hiring.  I expect a 6 year old kid to know better than that.

If he/she paid off someone to get appointed, that would be corruption.  Thus far, there is no evidence to that.  We will see...

[BravoV]

More incompetent than corruption, I think.  This CIO thinks he/she can get an assurance that his/her machines cannot get inflected.  That is like asking the doctor to assure that you will not get a cold.  To destroy a mouse?  TV?  My goodness.  And this from the CIO!  Geeze, who are they hiring.  I expect a 6 year old kid to know better than that.

If he/she paid off someone to get appointed, that would be corruption.  Thus far, there is no evidence to that.  We will see...

Quoted from above foxnews link :

"According to the report, the agency spent $1.06 million on “building a temporary infrastructure, pending long-term IT solution;” $823,000 on hiring the cybersecurity contractor; $688,000 on “contractor assistance for a long-term recovery solution;" and $4,300 to destroy $170,000 worth of tech equipment. "

Not only that 4300 bucks, somebody else also got paid for those above millions of dollars for the "temporary infrastructure" and "else" which I really doubt that is a clean without corruption on that particular budget spending, its easy to smell something fishy in there.

C'mon, in these days ? No body is that stupid. 

[mikeselectricstuff]

I never cease to be amazed by the levels of incompetence and total stupidity of people like this, and that they don't get fired. Does nobody ever get pulled into the office and asked "What the fuck were you thinking".

What I want to know is whether public office attracts such dull people with no imagination and little common sense, or the job makes them like that.

[Rerouter]

it attracts them like a plague. same for council workers, some are good people but scum get in and drag the whole thing down,

[KJDS]

What I want to know is whether public office attracts such dull people with no imagination and little common sense, or the job makes them like that.

It's a combination of both. Whilst I've not worked directly in a public organisation, I've worked for companies that do space or military work that is largely funded by government and ESA. In those, anyone with ambition, nous, common sense and a sense of humour is hounded out the door and replaced with someone that will timewaste whilst following the outdated procedures. At one well known satellite company it took a draughtsman three weeks to produce a drawing that would have taken me 45 minutes to produce in autocad. I finally gave up working there after being ordered to design a test rig to test a non functioning space model. The only useful work I did in seven months there was to reformat two large MS Word documents.

What really struck me were the barriers between departments, where each was determined that it would tell the world that it was perfect and never made mistakes by making it almost impossible to do anything unless every input to them had already been perfected.

[kripton2035]

I never cease to be amazed by the levels of incompetence and total stupidity of people like this, and that they don't get fired. Does nobody ever get pulled into the office and asked "What the fuck were you thinking".

What I want to know is whether public office attracts such dull people with no imagination and little common sense, or the job makes them like that.

not only they are not fired, but they surely earn more than me for doing that job... what a waste !

[amyk]

[madires]

Burning tax money for BS should be a felony.

[Mechatrommer]

img

after watching a blockbuster movie, i know nothing is secure since alien's hardware can get infected too. i dont know how much muggle got sucked up by this fact. in the end i just move along, if something bad happen i just reinstall fresh from clean format.

[dr.diesel]

Burning tax money for BS should be a felony.

Yeah, but it's the only thing the Government is good at?

[madires]

Burning tax money for BS should be a felony.

Yeah, but it's the only thing the Government is good at?

Then we should change the job description

[madworm]

Burning tax money for BS should be a felony.

You my friend are a 'terrorist' :->

I bet we will soon see the "Huntingdownsubversivepostsonaforum Act". Counter-measures will be covered by the "Canthavetheplebsknowwhatweredoing Act".

[madires]

after watching a blockbuster movie, i know nothing is secure since alien's hardware can get infected too. i dont know how much muggle got sucked up by this fact. in the end i just move along, if something bad happen i just reinstall fresh from clean format.

Common assumptions are that about 90% of all software written is crap. It's running somehow and prone to tons of programming mistakes, a lot of them creating security holes. The remaining 10% are ok-ish and only a few % of those 10% are written really well. How often had we to update the Flash plugin the last 12 months to mitigate (I deliberately don't write "fix") security issues?

[madires]

Burning tax money for BS should be a felony.

You my friend are a 'terrorist' :->

You just triggered NSA's keyword search engine and an agent has to investigate this now.

I bet we will soon see the "Huntingdownsubversivepostsonaforum Act". Counter-measures will be covered by the "Canthavetheplebsknowwhatweredoing Act".

Not so loud! Someone might get bad ideas 

[engineer_in_shorts]

Staying on topic:
here is my favorite anti-virus

[madires]

Staying on topic:
here is my favorite anti-virus

It's just an ad for snake oil software.

[Halcyon]

Perhaps their IT department were denied funding for upgrades, so what better way of ensuring they get what they want? :-)

[Delta]

Staying on topic:
here is my favorite anti-virus

Please please tell me that that is an Onionesque piss take? Please let it be so...

[Jeroen3]

Most software is developed like a sandcastle.
It's build, looks nice and stands up. But after a while it start to sink away in time and tide.
Then the manufacturer patches some more sand against it, making larger and uglier.
This continues for a few years. Soon there is no room anymore for more sand and it'll collapse on itself.

Then the manufacturer decides its time to take learned knowledge and create a new sandcastle, they rarely decide to build a fortress or house because that takes too long.