Health Ministry warned over virus

The Health Ministry has admitted it was advised to apply a software patch that would have prevented it from contracting a virus that crippled its systems this month.

The manager of the Government's Centre for Critical Infrastructure Protection (CCIP), Jonathon Berry, says the centre advised government agencies in October to apply a patch issued by Microsoft that fixes the vulnerability in the Windows XP operating system exploited by the virus, known as Conficker or Downadup. The infection at the ministry is believed to have occurred in December.

The ministry receives alerts issued by the CCIP but technology manager Alan Hesketh defended the delay in applying the patch. Software patches could prevent some of the ministry's older applications from working properly and it faced a balancing act deciding whether to apply them quickly or test them first.

"I get a little frustrated with vendors saying administrators have been too slow."

The ministry might change its approach to the trade-off as a result of the infection, however.

Mr Berry says agencies are not obliged to follow the CCIP's advice and accepts the ministry may have had legitimate concerns. The centre has had no reports of other government agencies being infected by the virus.

Mr Hesketh is confident the virus was not used to steal any ministry information. "We have had some consultants do some checks for us to make sure that did not happen. We hold very limited amounts of personal information anyway. It was mainly ministry documents and policy documents that we were concerned about."

"Symptoms" of the infection remained last week. The ministry will not restore staff access to the internet till it is confident the virus has been eradicated, to avoid the risk its 2000 PCs could be reinfected.

- © Fairfax NZ News