Manchester City Council has cancelled hundreds of fines for drivers caught on camera in bus lanes, after the Conficker worm hit its fine processing systems.
The council's IT systems were hit by the virus in February, and meant that 1,609 tickets could not be issued within the legal time limit of 28 days, it has been reported.
The council will now lose £43,000 in revenue from bus lane fines, the Manchester Evening News has reported.
More significantly, the Conficker worm problem will cost the council £1.5 million in total, the paper stated. The IT department spent £1.2 million fixing the problem, including £600,000 on external IT consultants, including Microsoft staff, £169,000 on staff to process a backlog of benefits claims and council tax bills, and compensation payments to families awaiting benefits.
The council's disaster recovery strategy has also come under fire, after staff were forced to keep paper records. They were unable to send emails and open computer files.
A report from the council said the systems problems caused by the virus resulted in "major concerns" on risks to "vulnerable adults and children through degraded social care activity" as well as delays to school admissions, the newspaper reported.
But the council said the risks were managed and that services were still delivered. Nevertheless, it has now banned staff from using memory sticks, and disabled all USB ports.
Steve Park, IT head at the council, said: "I'd like to reassure the public that we've built on and improved our disaster recovery strategy, which covers all our main networks. This means that in the event of an emergency those key systems can be recovered with minimal disruption to the services involved."
A week ago, it emerged that the council had breached the Data Protection Act after the theft of two unencrypted laptops, one of which contained personal details relating to 1,754 employees at local schools.
Comments
Gary Gemmell said: IT departments in all Councils are a disgrace in terms of their waste of money on consultants and useless IT helpdesks and badly programmed and co-ordinated systems - rather than train their loyal staff and give them the experience required to do the job - the bosses are all morons with Management degrees and no real life experience of ITI used to work for Glasgow council and it was disgraceful so bad i self terminated my own contract with no job to go to after 2 weeks i couldnt take it anymore The only time Ive ever chucked a jobI refuse to give anything but 101 but as with all councils 50 is the best you will ever get - jobs for the boys - have you ever tried to get a council job - yeah employ from within and keep it in the family - inbred is as inbred does
Paul said: I think they should re-name it the Robin Hood virus Robbing from the rich and giving to the poor I liked this bit of news a lot Good stuff
Chippychap said: If these clowns arent able to maintain their IT systems should they be allowed to keep itLot of peoples private data in the hands of buffoons
Dean said: Stupid idiots cant even take a daily backup Its their own fault
LOL said: Why not just simply re-install Windows ServerInstead of spending 12M for people to repair it S
Oh dear, what a shame. said: Im so distressed for the council losing out on all that money