Conficker worm and business continuity

The last week has illustrated some challenges around business continuity and corporate networks and the increasing need for emergency managers to be familiar with the basics of their organisations IT services

The Ministry of Health has been dealing with the Conficker worm that is now spreading rapidly across the world and is estimated to have affected over 6.5million windows computers in the last 4 days. Whilst things are coming back to normal, some of the control measures such as shutting down web based services in and out of the Ministry has obviously had a significant impact.

With delays last year around implementing the mirrored fallback site for the emergency management information system, the production server had to be taken down and we informed the sector and put in place other arrangements to manage an emergency until the production server was restored.

Restrictions continue on internet access, so as well as delays in updating this blog, we have had to think about access to computers outside the corporate environment so that we can access data on sites such as the World Health Organisation.

With the outbreak affecting more and more PC's now is the time to buy your friend in the IT department another coffee, confirm everything is up to date and think about how you would be able to maintain your critical communication links, inform your public and stakeholders and prioritise your system restoration.

Finally a big thanks to everyone who has worked so hard in the information directorate, especially those I always seem to talk to in desktop support and the application & server team for getting production restored so quickly.