German parliament cyber-attack still 'live'
Found on BBC News on Thursday, 11 June 2015
It involved attackers using malicious programs to infect many of the 20,000 machines used by politicians, support staff and civil servants that sit on the Parlakom network.
German newspaper Der Spiegel quoted a parliamentary source who said the malware was still "active" and stealing data from infected machines.
One report suggested that the federal office for computer security (BSI) had said that cleaning up the infection could cost millions of euros and involve replacing all the computers.
How hard can it be to just pull the cable out until everything is cleaned up? Sure, politicians will not be happy but that is completely unimportant if the infection continues to siphon the data to the outside. Furthermore, just replacing all computers won't really help much: some clueless politician finds another USB stick that got "lost" by someone and plugs it in without thinking just to look around a bit, hoping to find something interesting. Voila, re-infected.