[ISN] Navy investigates NMCI's Welchia outbreak

From: InfoSec News (isnat_private)
Date: Tue Sep 02 2003 - 06:15:45 PDT

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    http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2003/0825/web-worm-08-29-03.asp
    
    By Matthew French 
    Aug. 29, 2003 
    
    Navy officials want to know how a worm got into the Navy Marine Corps
    Intranet.
    
    Earlier this month, the so-called Welchia worm infected thousands of
    systems nationwide, including a few prominent government systems such
    as NMCI, which is designed to connect everyone in the Navy and Marine
    Corps on a single, secure network. It was the first time NMCI fell
    victim to a virus since the services started adding users to the
    system in 2001.
    
    Now the Navy has begun an inquiry to determine the sequence of events
    leading to the event, its root cause and the full scope of operational
    impact, including the specific circumstances that made NMCI
    vulnerable. The lessons will lead to changes in the Navy's operating
    processes and procedures to minimize similar incidents in the future.
    
    "It would be Pollyanna-ish to assume that this can't happen again, so
    we're going to take this as a learning experience," said Capt. Chris
    Christopher, NMCI staff director.
    
    The investigation, being led by the Naval Network Warfare Command, is
    largely focusing on what happened before Welchia struck. However, once
    the worm was discovered, the Navy responded adequately to the
    emergency, a department official said.
    
    "The particular circumstance of the Welchia attack was that the worm
    was passed to NMCI hours before the updated antivirus signatures to
    detect and repel the work became available," the official said.  
    "However, the ability of NMCI to push software tools to all
    workstations on the network enabled us deploy the new signature file
    as soon as it became available, containing the infection very
    quickly."
    
    Vice Adm. Richard Mayo, commander of Naval Network Warfare Command,
    said the protection of the Navy's networks will continue to be a
    priority as the nation's defense base becomes more reliant on
    networks.
    
    "The Department of the Navy partnership with the IT industry that led
    to NMCI has created structure and a command organization to prevent
    and quickly respond to enterprise network threats such as this," he
    said.
    
    Consultant Robert Guerra of Guerra, Kiviat, Flyzik and Associates Inc.  
    said he doubts the outage will have any lasting effects on either lead
    contractor EDS or the NMCI program.
    
    "The history of the performance of the network is incredible," he
    said. "It's been up for a couple of years and this would mark the
    first time it's been down. The project has a responsible vendor, who's
    done a great job at deploying a very complex network, and a very good
    customer in the Navy."
    
    Since users started being moved to the system in 2001, more than
    99,000 seats have been shifted to NMCI from legacy systems.
    
    
    
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