The Conficker worm outbreak caught a lot of people off guard, but the Manchester City Council impresses through its recent announcement of cleanup costs amounting to £1.5 million ($2.45 million). The sum represents the losses in bus lane tickets that were never issued, as well as the cost of buying new equipment and hiring consultants.

In a recent report, entitled "Service interruption resulting from ICT disruption in February 2009," that outlines the severity of the incident, it is noted that 1,609 fines, totaling £43,000 ($70,000), could not be issued within the legal limit of 28 days, because the systems went down.

Benefit claims and council tax bills also piled up, forcing the town hall to spend £178,000 ($276,000) on additional staff and compensation payments. Another £600,000 ($981,000) was spent by the IT department in order to pay third-party consultants and experts for assisting with the cleanup.

The Council also acquired Wyse terminals for £600,000, as part of a new backup strategy, but the report stresses that these thin clients were approved in the budget since before the Conficker incident happened.

The outbreak clearly revealed that the Council's disaster recovery plan was far from efficient. Workers were left unable to access and print vital documents or send e-mails, and ultimately had to rely on pen and paper to perform their duties.

"I'd like to reassure the public that we've built on and improved our disaster recovery strategy, which covers all our main networks," Steve Park, the head of ICT at the Manchester City Council, said, according to Manchester Evening News. "This means that in the event of an emergency those key systems can be recovered with minimal disruption to the services involved," he added.

After the incident, the city hall chiefs not only banned the use of portable USB devices, but went as far as disabling all USB ports on computers across the network. According to the most optimistic figures released by the Conficker Working Group, there are still at least 1.25 million systems in the world infected with the worm.