Conficker spotted in critical medical equipment

A security expert has warned that the Conficker worm has been spotted on hundreds of workstations as well as critical medical equipment in a number of hospitals recently. Some of the affected devices control machines such as heart monitors and MRI machines, which is cause for concern.

At the moment though, it is unclear how these machines are infected, since some of them are on internal, standalone networks. However, they tend to consist of older machines running on Windows NT and Windows 2000, which mean that a single infection could rapidly spread.

Marcus Sachs, the director of the SANS Internet Storm Center spoke to CNET News about this latest development. While he says this problem does not appear to be widespread, Sachs cautioned that the incident highlights the need to raise awareness of the potential of infected machines at places like hospitals and locations that host critical infrastructure.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CNET News