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People in glass houses... Labour spent billions failing to upgrade the NHS computer system - so much wasted money that it's the number one example of IT project failures - estimates between £12 billion and £19 billion for a database - which was scrapped... (found a reference to £12 billion, and lectures at uni place it at "up to £19 billion" I don't have access to last years lecture notes so can't check if there's a reference)
I mean, there will be people in the labour party now who were directly responsible for the worlds largest IT fuck-up so throwing rocks about this security fubar might dredge up the fact that had there not been billions thrown down the toilet there *might* have been plenty for upgrading systems so XP wasn't involved... or perhaps enough money to train staff at the NHS to not open every email attachment and click on every link... or both...
No doubt there'll be rumblings along the lines of lessons being learnt but it's been quite the cock up.
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Then they claim they need more £Billions to waste on other areas.
They couldn't organise a kids birthday party let alone run the country fookin arse holes.
According to The Register there are a million+ NHS running XP**. Between hardware, software, installation and training etc it's probably fair to assume at least £1000 per computer... so about £1billion...
Now, the database that labour were responsible for was supposed to cost £6.5 billion it's fair to assume that in part the old system (still in place because the system that was 2-3 times more expensive than it was meant to be) is a reason for keeping XP.
So a cost to upgrade will be somewhere between £1billion-£7.5billion
Which translates to sacking 42,883 - 321,626 nurses at the average nurses wage... unless someone stumps up the extra budget. Budgets were not going up, so as sacking a quarter million nurses would be unpopular there simply wouldn't be the money for it
**https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/12/nhs_microsoft_win_xp_extended_support/
You might look at that and think "But if we're paying for extended support why did this happen?" well this would likely have been a zero day exploit - hence a globally distributed patch *now* being available as soon as it was discovered that the vulnerability exists.
An awful lot of organisations want IT to cost £0 but produce all the results before anyone knew they were needed. I absolutely guarantee that the NHS IT department wanted to upgrade and will have pitched for the budget, but someone will have said something along the lines of "too expensive, make do with what you have - we don't think your doom and gloom projections reflect the real risk"
As as far as XP goes, I think , we mostly run Windows 7 at least. There is one computer in the office where I work that runs XP and It's only used when staff want to access a specific programme that would cost thousands to upgrade and, because the programme is so specialised, it won't be updated for a long long time. The XP machines, that I know of, can't access the Internet and are only used for certain softwares - everything else on them is disabled.
They are on 7 now but that's still not great altho still under support at least.
The vulnerability was patched in March (iirc) in one of MS security updates but it takes time to roll out these updates as they go through a testing and approval process in most organisations - a lot of places wait until they see info on the patches and their success before deploying
We work with a lot of public sector and the argument for going to VDI (altho many colleges etc are already) is strong in cases like this. Ransomware is useless with a virtual desktop - you can just deploy a new one with the user data ready to go.
We actually sell a product that can restore an encrypted machine from a point 5 seconds before it happened.
Too many companies don't know the difference between backup and DR (Disaster Recovery) solutions - it's getting more scary out there for smaller companies - IT is so important but people don't think that when they look at their budget for the year - linkedIn is already full of people jumping on this opportunity to use the fear but in this case it's justified.
If you lose all your data - what does that mean for your company - it's now more likely for that to happen in a cyber attack than if the building burns down!
My day tomorrow will be advising our customers that their environments are safe - and pointing out to those on older OS and Server versions that we need to talk!
This one event will be the very best thing to happen to millions of IT techs - companies/organisations will shit bricks trying to modernise and prevent something like this happening again.
Also, anyone currently studying for some form of security based qualification *cough* will find themselves in a world with substantially higher demand for security experts (till bosses forget again that security is an ongoing thing)
On a positive note my local hospital is up and running .. not as bad as the press reported.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
But outside the usual Labour vs Conservative nonsense, I'd like to know how much the whole thing is actually the fault of the civil servants who are supposed to be managing everything - I'd bet the majority who actually oversaw the multi-billion-pound fuckup are all still in their jobs. How do you actually get as far as spending 15 billion without producing something that works, *on some level*??
My feedback thread is here.
If what you say is true then she did it because someone advised her to. That someone being the Civil Service.
I also have some experience of dealing with Government departments on IT systems and the Civil Service is a huge reason why they often go tits up. Amongst their many qualities Civil Servants usually can't tell you what they want, on the rare occasions they can they change their mind about 2 days later, they won't listen to people who know what they're talking about and they make it as difficult as it is possible to be to roll out fixes and patches even when the integrity of the system is at risk.