German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection

An anonymous reader writes "German IT magazine Heise reports (original in German) that the Ministry of Education in Schwerin had a Conficker virus infection on 170 machines, that was dealt with by simply throwing them on the trash. Other German authorities have now decided that 'the approach taken is not up to the principle of efficiency and economy' and that the 187,300 Euro invested in this radical form of virus removal were inappropriate. The ministry had earlier estimated the cost of cleaning their desktops and servers by more conventional means to 130,000 Euro."

Re:The Google translated article

[stepdown]

That actually reads pretty well, we should pass Timothy's posts through Google Translate in future.

Re:They can't rei-mage them with windows?

[flyingfsck]

Yeah, but it is Germany. In order to do IT work on a PC, you need to have a plumber and an electrician on standby and you are not allowed to do more than one PC at the same time...

Re:Far cheaper options

[Anonymous Coward]

ps. I doubt your secretary can tell which OS they're running in the first place

Then you're an idiot. Just because someone doesn't understand technology doesn't mean they don't know when their menu items are in different places or when the nice obvious icon they had becomes some in-joke about Klingons.

Re:Clarifications (due to rampant bullshit here)

[Registered Coward v2]

This happened in 2010. Those were old computers. They already had the money to buy replacements budgeted in their 2010/2011 budget.

So they had to decide to pull the effort the reimage everything for a couple of months, or just buy the new ones early. Buying the new ones early did cost a bit more (30k for all of them), but less then a cleaning would have cost.

The servers, who where not sheduled for replacement, were reimaged just fine.

This happened in 2010. Those were old computers. They already had the money to buy replacements budgeted in their 2010/2011 budget.

So they had to decide to pull the effort the reimage everything for a couple of months, or just buy the new ones early. Buying the new ones early did cost a bit more (30k for all of them), but less then a cleaning would have cost.

The servers, who where not sheduled for replacement, were reimaged just fine.

How dare you inject reason and facts into a /. arguement? You're supposed to say Windoze Bad Linux Shiney Free and accuse anyone with a different view of being an MS shill or troll. Replacing rather than cleaning is the right thing to do, it would have been more fiscally irresponsible to clean and then replace, and no doubt under German law the old ones were recycled rather than just dumped in the trash.

given that reimaging would involve more than simply pushing out a new image but would need machines to be offline to avoid reinfection, there is also productivity losses and associated costs as well.

On the bright side...

[Mystakaphoros]

...how often do we get to make fun of Germany for making a boneheaded decision regarding technology? I say we savor this one for years to come, as stories like this are a dime a dozen over in the States.