The Conficker worm has struck again, this time infiltrating computers owned by the Greater Manchester Police (GMP).
After the worm was found in the GMP's IT systems on Friday, the force cut all connections to the Police National Computer and other criminal justice systems to prevent them from being infected.
Assistant Chief Constable Dave Thompson confirmed that no data had been lost Conficker can often just mess with systems by taking up bandwidth but noted it spread very quickly.
"A team of experts is now working on removing the virus, and will not reconnect until we are sure there is no further threat," he said in a statement.
"We have systems in place to ensure this does not affect our service to the communities of Greater Manchester," he added.
There has been no confirmation on how the IT system got infected with the worm in the first place but Thompson said it would be investigating in order to prevent it from happening again.
Conficker was initially thought to access systems by exploiting flaws in Windows, but Microsoft has since patched the issue. It seems to spread though personal devices without proper security, such as USB sticks.
Jason Holloway, sales manager in Northern Europe for SanDisk, said this new case highlighted the need for better virus scanning. "This underlines the fact that conventional USB flash drives are a key method for spreading these infections stealthily, and without the drive's user being aware as both Ealing and Manchester Councils found last year," he said in a statement. "Virus scanning has to extend beyond the PC to all types of removable storage. Better still, employees should only be able to use authorised flash drives that include on-board antivirus scanning. This ensures that users can't turn off, disable or work around the protection, and would stop these infections from spreading."
The Conficker worm first surfaced in 2008 and was the headline-topping virus of last year. Many high profile IT systems have fallen victim, including the House of Commons, Ministry of Defence and Oxford Brookes University. Overall, the number of computers affected runs into the millions.
