A QUICK-THINKING North-East soldier has been credited with saving the Ministry of Defence millions of pounds.

Darren Lynch, of Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, tackled a computer virus threatening to infect the entire Royal Military Police (RMP) network.

Corporal Lynch was on duty alone instead of the usual three soldiers administering the Northern Ireland system when he spotted the infection.

The 33-year-old recognised a variant of the conficker worm capable of spreading across the system and wrecking the service’s entire network.

He immediately isolated the Lisburn computers from the rest of the UK and began tackling the bug which had already infected dozens of terminals.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said: “Despite being alone, he instigated a huge clean-up programme involving ‘ghosting’ or wiping the hard drives of all the Northern Ireland linked terminals and then developing a complete software re-build and installation.

“It was a mammoth singlehanded task that took long hours over many days but which completely destroyed the virus allowing Northern Ireland’s service police computers to be linked again to the UK-wide network.”

The spokesman added: “As a result of his actions, Cpl Lynch not only saved millions of pounds for the defence budget but was also recognised with the award of a Provost Marshall Army Commendation.”

Cpl Lynch said it involved a “number of hard days’ work”.

Last year, Manchester City Council spent £1.2m removing the conficker worm from its network and lost tens of thousands more in revenue