[ISN] Conficker infected critical hospital equipment, expert says

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10226448-83.html

By Elinor Mills
Security 
CNET News
April 23, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Conficker worm infected several hundred machines 
and critical medical equipment in an undisclosed number of hospitals 
recently, a security expert said on Thursday in a panel at the RSA 
security conference.

"It was not widespread, but it raises the awareness of what we would do 
if there were millions" of computers infected at hospitals or in 
critical infrastructure locations, Marcus Sachs told CNET News after the 
session. Sachs is the director of the SANS Internet Storm Center and a 
former White House cybersecurity official.

It is unclear how the devices, which control things like heart monitors 
and MRI machines, and the PCs got infected, he said. The computers are 
older machines running Windows NT and Windows 2000 in a local area 
network that was not supposed to have access to the Internet, however, 
the network was connected to one that has direct Internet access and so 
they were infected, he said.

Conficker spreads via networked computers as well as through removable 
storage devices and a hole in Windows that Microsoft patched in October, 
but these machines were too old to be patched, according to Sachs.

[...]


--
LayerOne 2009, Information Security for the discerning professional. 
May 23-24 2009 @ The Anaheim Marriott in Anaheim, California 
Visit http://layerone.info for more information