Apr
30

Conficker Worm Hits U.S. Hospitals, Infecting Computers and Equipment

Adrian Covert on April 30th, 2009

Cnet says that hundreds of critical hospital devices across the U.S. have been infected by the Conficker worm. The number of hospitals affected wasn’t disclosed, but the problem isn’t thought to be widespread.

Cybersecurity expert Marcus Sachs broke the news at a security conference in San Francisco, raising the question of what would happen if this were to happen to millions of machines in the medical industry. According to sachs, the devices affected were hospital computers and devices used to control critical equipment, such as heart monitors and MRI machines.

No one is quite sure how the computers acquired the worms to begin with, but most of the Windows 2000/NT machines were to old to benefit from Microsoft’s October patch which fixed many of the vulnerabilities Conficker preyed on. [Cnet via Slashdot]

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Apr
29

AMD’s $69 2.8GHz Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition CPU Reviewed (Verdict: Not Bad For the Price)

Sean Fallon on April 29th, 2009

Years ago I used to build with AMD processors because I was looking for decent power at an affordable price. Their new Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition claims to do that for only $69.

So far reviews have been generally positive, with the consensus being that the 2.8GHz chip with 2MB of L3 cache isn’t spectacular, but it can deliver enough performance to handle the latest games. Because it’s a Black Edition, users are going to want to overclock this thing, and the Overclocker’s Club concluded that while it can’t stand up to triple and quad cores, it could beat the Athlon X2 7750 as well as the Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 in several tests. The overclocking process was a bit tedious and they could only push it to x1.5 over stock, but overall it gives you a decent bang for your buck. If you are looking for additional opinions on the 7850, Engadget has rounded up several reviews. [AMD and Engadget]

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