Santa Fe city government computers knocked out by worm

Sun Nov 16 11:22:08 UTC 2003

The US is still losing relatively major city government computer networks
due to the Nachi/Welchia worm.

Sante Fe city government's entire computer network was knocked offline
on Friday by the Nachi worm.  City employees could not access e-mail or
work with their computers all day Friday, and the Santa Fe Public Library
was not able to access the Internet.

Officials say the worm infected the system when an employee downloaded
music on a city computer.  The article says the worm was able to infect
the city computer system by first disabling the system's virus detection
system.  Both statements would be notable because known versions of
Nachi/Welchia don't spread that way.

http://kobtv.com/index.cfm?viewer=storyviewer&id=6232&cat=HOME

No explaination why Sante Fe officials had not patched the city's
computers in the three months since Microsoft announced the vulnerability
and released the software updates.  Nor why Sante Fe didn't have up to
date anti-virus programs running on its computers.