Actually, I think too many assumptions were made. Let's simplify. We know UUNet traffic capabilities were reduced significantly. Uunet has many big customers. Other big carriers had similar affects on their networks, probably particularly at peering points. We know many companies use public or private VPN services from major carriers such as these, and that both VPN types may use public internet carriers. I think therefore that the only true conclusion we could say is that if BoA's traffic was not prioritized, it therefore suffered collateral damage primarily due to traffic not being able to get through between ATM's and the central processing center. Ray Burkholder
-----Original Message----- From: Alex Rubenstein [mailto:alex@nac.net] Sent: January 25, 2003 18:45 To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Banc of America Article
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.
b) BoA has not applied SP3 (available for a week) or the patch for this particular problem (SQL Slammer) (available for many months).
c) somehow, this attack spawned on the public internet made it's way to BoA's SQL servers, bypassing firewalls (did they have firewalls?).
Another article states, "Bank of America Corp., one of the nation's largest banks, said many customers could not withdraw money from its 13,000 ATM machines because of technical problems caused by the attack. A spokeswoman, Lisa Gagnon, said the bank restored service to nearly all ATMs by late Saturday afternoon and that customers' money and personal information had not been at risk."
Does anyone else, based upon the assumptions above, believe this statement to be patently incorrect (specifically, the part about 'personal information had not been at risk.') ?
I find these statement made by BoA, based upon assumptions which are probably correct, to be very scary.
Comments?
-- Alex Rubenstein, AR97, K2AHR, alex@nac.net, latency, Al Reuben -- -- Net Access Corporation, 800-NET-ME-36, http://www.nac.net --