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Sun 26 Jan, 2003 08:11 pm
Quote:washingtonpost.com
Bank of America ATMs Disrupted by Virus
Reuters
Saturday, January 25, 2003; 5:33 PM
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Bank of America Corp. said on Saturday that customers at a majority of its 13,000 automatic teller machines were unable to process customer transactions after a malicious computer worm nearly froze Internet traffic worldwide.
Bank of America spokeswoman Lisa Gagnon said by phone from the company's headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, that many, if not a majority of the No. 3 U.S. bank's ATMs were back online and that their automated banking network would recover by late Saturday.
Web traffic slowed suddenly and dramatically worldwide for hours after a fast-spreading computer worm clogged pipelines of the global network carrying data, Web pages and e-mail, officials said.
"We have been impacted, and for a while customers could not use ATMs and customer services could not access customer information," Gagnon said.
Gagnon said that the worm, which slows down computer networks by replicating rapidly and spreading to other servers, did not cause any damage to customer information, but slowed down or blocked access to that sensitive information, making transactions difficult.
What is your take on this? Do you think that this worm was the work of some internet pain in the neck, or something with much more sinister implications?
Sounds like an act of terrism. Imagine needing cash and not being able to get into the ATM. Scary!
Terrorism gets my award for knee-jerk word of excessive use prize.
When reading about this the other day this thought came to mind. Since we have become so dependent on the computer and computer systems what would happen if someone was able to generate a virus that would disrupt or permanently disable most of the computer systems around the world?
Someone else would develop a way to remove and isolate the virus just like they've been doing for some time now.
As a side note: A large portion of MSN's network was down most of the weekend due to this virus. I wasn't able to authenticate as a MSN user and get to my MSN e-mail account all weekend.
fishin'
My question was regarding the disruption if it took say a week to repair the damage and the possibility of records being destroyed or lost.
USA
Internet attack rattling assumptions
Posted: Tuesday, January 28, 7:51am EST
Disruptions from the weekend attack on the Internet are shaking popular perceptions that vital national services, including banking operations and 911 centers, are largely immune to such attacks.
Damage in some of these areas was worse than many experts had believed possible.
The nation's largest residential mortgage firm, Countrywide Financial Corp., told customers who called Monday that its systems were still suffering. Its Web site, where customers can make payments and check their loans, was closed most of the day.
Police and fire dispatchers outside Seattle resorted to paper and pencil for hours after the virus-like attack on the weekend disrupted operations for the 911 center that serves two suburban police departments and at least 14 fire departments.
American Express Co. confirmed that customers couldn't reach its website to check credit statements and account balances during parts of the weekend. The attack prevented many customers of Bank of America Corp., one of the largest US banks, and some large Canadian banks from withdrawing money from automatic teller machines Saturday.
President Bush's No. 2 cyber-security adviser, Howard Schmidt, acknowledged that what he called "collateral damage" stunned even the experts who have warned about uncertain effects on the nation's most important electronic systems from mass-scale Internet disruptions.
The White House and Canadian defense officials confirmed they were investigating how the attack, which started about 12:30 a.m. EST Saturday, could have affected ATM banking and other important networks that should remain immune from traditional Internet outages.
The attack, alternately dubbed "Slammer" or "Sapphire," sought vulnerable computers to infect using a known flaw in popular database software from Microsoft Corp. called "SQL Server 2000."
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