Forwarded from: John Blaylock <john_blaylock@private> Y'know, unless every person that accesses this CLASS system does so with their own networked mainframe under their desk, chances are they use a PC to get their green screen, and possibly a PC gateway server. (You have to be able to play minesweep when not checking records! Can't do that on a dumb terminal!) These are susceptible to the myriad baddies running around in the ether. Mainframes are not able to function in a network vacuum. A mainframe that can't be communicated with is just as good as down.... John > WASHINGTON - The State Department's electronic system for checking > every visa applicant for terrorist or criminal history failed > worldwide late Tuesday because of a computer virus, leaving the U.S. > government unable to issue visas. > > The virus crippled the department's Consular Lookout and Support > System, known as CLASS, which contains more than 12.8 million > records from the FBI, State Department and U.S. immigration, > drug-enforcement and intelligence agencies. Among the names are > those of at least 78,000 suspected terrorists. CLASS runs on a mainframe. Excuse me but what virus released recently infects a mainframe? And they've got at least 2 of them. One here in DC and the other in the mountains of WVa. infected the end-user terminals I would definately conceed since those are windoze PC's running various home-grown application to access said database. And desktop security was quite pathetic. - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomo@private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Sep 26 2003 - 03:57:47 PDT