A right Royal pain in the Dallas: City IT systems crippled by ransomware The city of Dallas, Texas, is working to restore city services following a ransomware attack that crippled its IT systems. On May 3 Dallas' Information and Technology Services (ITS) said around than 200 of the US city's thousands of devices appear to be affected by the infection. ITS said it is focused on fixing compromised …
7 years for me in a Fed agency with critical classified work going on. The worst came not because of some hapless, clueless Windows user or admin, but due to a lazy, self-entitled, too-cool-for-skool Linux admin who didn't update SSH. The entire facility disconnected for a couple days and terabytes of research data lost.
There are some good ones, no question. I hope I could be considered one.
But the bigger problem I saw was the adipose layer of middle-managers not smart enough to say anything other than 'everything's fine'. And make promises they couldn't keep.
I understand that various city functions may all be managed by one IT department, but why, oh why, do they appear to be on one interconnected network?
"Dallas Water Utilities, the city said, is unable to process payments and disconnections will be suspended until service is restored. City courts are closed and cases will be rescheduled and jurors do not need to report for service. And various other agencies related to records and permits report serious delays."
Exactly what does a billing payment system by a water utlity need to have in common with a courts booking system? Why is there any common connection at all between these?
One can only hope the water dept kept their scada and control systems isolated from their billing systems.
The only explanation I can think of is that all of these things involve financial actions. The water department systems that aren't working are related to bills and the court system needs to collect fines and pay jurors, and many other parts of the government will have to handle some financial matter. Maybe all the financial stuff is run by one part of the city bureaucracy which has a common network. That's not necessarily a good idea, but it's also not that unusual for systems run by one organization to have less internal separation than would be desirable.
Not to mention, the typical juror makes between 6 and 60 bucks a day on jury duty in Dallas, hardly an amount worth worrying about, AND the payment is made after the duty is complete. Unless they expect it to take months to fix, this should only affect jurors who already finished their service.
Just spitballing here, but they would both be based on a database of city residents. Those who pay water bills and those eligible for jury service - would not be the same lists obviously, but there must be quite a lot of overlap. If I were trying to simplify my citizens' lives, it might occur to me that a single "master" database of people could be used to power many different services.
There are no limits to what a woman can do to her body in the US. it's when what she wants to do affects someone else's life that the problem creeps in. Rape, incest, child's viability or mother's life are legit reasons to abort. Convenience is not. Murder is illegal and court precedence already says that killing an unborn child is murder; someone who kills a pregnant woman will be charged and convicted with two murders, not one. Otherwise, she was a willing participant and should suffer the consequences of playing with the start button on the baby making machine. Don't want a kid, there's abstinence, birth control, other orifices and sterilization available. Sterilization would likely be a much easier option to get if there were a blanket ban on "changed my mind, you should have known I would" lawsuits. Adoption is always a possibility as well.
Have they tried turning it off and on again?
They could try the flush handle, cos working in IT is a bit like working as a janitor, right?
It has tubes and shit, ask any bean counter or csuite, it’s kinda like a toilet, I mean it is technology after all.
Pay peanuts get monkeys
Don’t listen to experts, get ransomware
You know, the experts you employed
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