Banc of America Article

Sun Jan 26 03:27:22 UTC 2003

On Sat, 25 Jan 2003, Alex Rubenstein wrote:

> http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/030125/tech_virus_boa_1.html

> Let's make the assumption that the outage of ATM's that BoA suffered was
> caused by last nights 'SQL Slammer' virus.
>
> The following things can then be assumed:
>
> a) BoA's network has Microsoft SQL Servers on them.

Not necessarily.  There's this statement from a BoA employee:

'"We have been impacted, and for a while customers could not use ATMs and
customer services could not access customer information," Gagnon said.'

While that's clear as mud, one could also infer that the network that they
depend on to interconnect their ATMs and branches was impacted by all the
garbage network being carried at the time.  They don't disclose how these
atm's and branches are connected back to their datacenter(s?), but perhaps
someone had the bright idea of tunneling everything over something like
the Qwest network, which some here reported as being b0rked for quite some
time...  Or perhaps they (or the VPN concentration gear) are in a shared
datacenter space where other customers bouncing this junk around trashed
the network within the datacenter.  These days you can never make
assumptions about what passes for BCP.

Just another possibility...  Mind you I'm not rushing out to open an
account with them.

C

> Comments?
>
>
> -- Alex Rubenstein, AR97, K2AHR, alex at nac.net, latency, Al Reuben --
> --    Net Access Corporation, 800-NET-ME-36, http://www.nac.net   --
>
>
>