I find this ATM outage curious. A couple of jobs ago, BofA was a customer of mine using our ATM monitoring software. At that time, 6 years ago to be sure, ATMs were on leased lines or satellite connections to the banks central processing systems. In the ensuing time, have banks began using inexpensive broadband Internet connections to communicate with these remote devices? If this is the case, this worm could take the machines off-line through the DDOS effect. Do they use SQL server on Intel on the backend now? This would be quite different form the Tandem, AS400, Unisys, minis used at that time. This could have caused outages due to filtering at routers to block the worm, but implies that the data connections between the ATMs and the database aren't encrypted. I can't believe that to be the case. Having an understanding of how these links worked relatively recently and a concern for security in financial institutions, I have to ask how this worm had the effect of downing BofA's ATM network. __________________________________________ JOHN MCGUIRE CISSP, MCSE2k, MCSE+I Network Security Specialist 888.529.0401 jmcguireat_private Strictly Business www.sbcs.com "Richard M. Smith" To: <jasoncat_private>, "'Jay D. Dyson'" <jdysonat_private>, "'Bugtraq'" <rms@computerbyte <bugtraqat_private>, "'Full-Disclosure'" <full-disclosureat_private> sman.com> cc: Subject: RE: MS SQL WORM IS DESTROYING INTERNET BLOCK PORT 1434! 01/25/2003 06:11 PM However, this worm might not be so harmless as it appears because of collateral damage: Bank of America ATMs Disrupted by Virus http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=578&e=3&cid=569&u=/nm/2 0030125/tc_nm/tech_virus_dc "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." Richard M. Smith http://www.ComputerBytesMan.com -----Original Message----- From: Jason Coombs [mailto:jasoncat_private] Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 4:41 PM To: Jay D. Dyson; Bugtraq Subject: RE: MS SQL WORM IS DESTROYING INTERNET BLOCK PORT 1434! Jay Dyson wrote: > And to think...up until tonight, I thought the vulnerabilities > that paved the way for Nimda were the worst that Microsoft could do > to the net.community. They've really topped themselves this time. As of now we don't know who wrote the worm, but we do know that it looks like a concept worm with no malicious payload. There is a good argument to be made in favor of such worms. Whomever did write this worm could have done severe damage beyond unfocused DDoS and chose not to do so. One would expect intelligence agencies in developed countries to write and release precisely this type of concept worm as a form of mass inoculation against malicious attacks. Before you get upset at your vendor, or anyone else's, consider the bigger picture and recognize the increased security hardening the Internet just received. Belief in this silver lining shouldn't be taken too far, of course, but flaming anyone over an event like this is misplaced considering the number of infosec experts who would probably have agreed to write this worm if approached by their nations' government with proof that an adversary was planning to cause severe harm by exploiting the W32/SQLSlammer vulnerability. Sincerely, Jason Coombs jasoncat_private _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
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