14 DAY TRIAL // Local media in Houston is reporting that a computer worm has slowed the computer network serving the justice system down to a crawl. Police officers have been ordered not to make arrests for minor offenses, while the Municipal Courts have been shut down until Monday evening.
The problems started when workers from a Municipal Court started reporting that access to several files was being blocked and the computers seemed to slow down. Moreover, by Thursday night the city officials were literally struggling to contain a full blown computer worm outbreak.
According to Janis Benton, the city’s deputy director of information technology, the Conficker worm is the most likely candidate. The Houston Information Technology Department contracted an outside security consultancy company to help keep the outbreak under control and clean the malware from the infected computers.
Meanwhile, because the Court's computers were a mess, officers from the Houston Police Department (HPD) were forced to limit arrests. “The people we pull over with outstanding traffic warrants will be issued a citation rather than being taken to jail,” HPD spokesman John Cannon commented for 11News. However, “Anyone suspected of a violent crime will be taken to jail. We’re not cutting back on that,” the official stressed.
Houston's Mayor Bill White had to take the decision of suspending court activity over the weekend. The courts closed early at 16:00 on Friday, and remained like that until Tuesday morning. All the cases scheduled for discussion were postponed to later dates. Other Court services like paying fines remained functional, though, and were also available on-line.
People also had a hard time getting released from jail as bond posting had also been seriously affected. According to the Houston Chronicle, Patrick Trahan, spokesman for the mayor, stated that people would be able to make bail, however workers at some bonding agencies confirmed that the process had been significantly slowed down, while others were not even aware that bond posting was possible until Tuesday.
The Conficker worm is one of the fastest spreading and most resilient worms in history. It propagates by exploiting a Windows vulnerability, and currently counts around 12 million infected computers worldwide. The worm has wrecked havoc on enterprise and government networks in many countries around the globe and has raised a wave of critics from a lot of security researchers who condemned the inability of IT departments to patch computer systems in a timely manner. Microsoft released a patch for this vulnerability since November, while the infection count exploded with the release of the second variant of the worm, in mid-December.