Cleveland Police suffered a major outage after its computer systems were infected by the Conficker worm in February, ZDNet UK has learnt.
The North of England police force's main systems had to be taken offline for three days after becoming infected, Cleveland Police told ZDNet UK in response to a Freedom of Information request. "[An] infected CD containing evidential CCTV footage [was] loaded into a standalone PC, which was inadvertently joined to the network briefly for routine maintenance," Cleveland Police said.
A Cleveland Police spokeswoman told ZDNet on Wednesday that the infection was from a Conficker variant. Conficker is a pernicious network worm that targets flaws in Microsoft software and can spread via a number of methods, including infected USB drives and dictionary attacks on passwords over a network.
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