RE: Banc of America Article

["Temkin, David" <temkin () sig com>]

I think you're leaving out a very viable possibility in your summary...

What if BoA took a proactive approach and shut down their SQL environment
(even though none of us known conclusively if they're a SQL or Oracle shop)
to verify that it was in fact clean and not compromised.  When you're
talking about access to billions of dollars, it's not worth taking a chance.
They might have actually followed proper security protocol and verified
their systems were clean before re-activating them.

Just a thought.

-Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alex Rubenstein [SMTP:alex () nac net]
> Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2003 10:59 AM
> To:   Ray Burkholder
> Cc:   nanog () nanog org
> Subject:      RE: Banc of America Article
>
>
>
> Let me summarize, then ask a question:
>
> a) BoA uses the public internet for ATM transactions. The public internet
> was so dead, that every one of thier ATM machines was dead for many hours,
> even many hours longer than the public internet was dead.
>
> b) BoA uses it's own network for it's on ATM transactions. Somewhere on
> the a public to private connection, a firewall wasn't doing it's job, or
> there wasn't a firewall. Things were broken for a while, until they were
> able to fix all thier SQL servers.
>
> I guess my point is, if it were a), not every ATM would be dead all the
> time, and things would have been fixed in only a little while. Not many
> internet 'backbones' (at least ones BoA would have used for this
> application) were down as long as BoA's ATM's were.
>
> On the other hand, I think it's more likely that BoA had unprotected SQL
> servers, and they got it. It took a long while for BoA IT people to make
> it out of bed saturday morning to fix the problem.
>
> I still clearly say that I don't know what happened, and I did make
> assumptions (as I said in the original mail) -- but I'd still place my
> money on b).
>
>
>
> On Sun, 26 Jan 2003, Ray Burkholder wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
>
>
> -- Alex Rubenstein, AR97, K2AHR, alex () nac net, latency, Al Reuben --
> --    Net Access Corporation, 800-NET-ME-36, http://www.nac.net   --
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