July 1992 Computer Fraud & Security Bulletin

57 for all of 1991. In March alone the number of

reports reached 24, well ahead of the two cases

reported in the same month last year.

An agency official said that public concern about computer viruses had increased as a result

of last year’s outbreak of the Michelangelo virus.

The official also said that the number of damage

claims so far over viruses is “probably only the tip of the iceberg”. The first reported case of a computer virus in Japan was discovered in the

late 1980s. MIT1 began a campaign to control the

spread of viruses in April 1990.

Disaster recovery drill goes wrong

A 10 April test of the disaster recovery plan

of the US Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco

went sour. The exercise involved the transfer

between the Bank’s IBM 3090 mainframe

computers located in San Francisco and Los

Angeles of a particular dataset involved in

internal machine operations. The transfer

clobbered the dataset and interrupted computer

operations for 12 hours. This shutdown interfered

with the processing of an estimated $1 billion,

largely consisting of automatic payroll and US

Social Security Administration regional benefit

payment deposits. The shutdown also interrupted

processing operations at 15 regional financial

institutions, including Security Pacific Bank and

First Interstate Bank, as well as thousands of

ATMs in both California and Arizona.

gelden ~effkus

SSA sweeps Benelux region

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has

announced legal actions against four companies

in Europe for suspected copyright infringement.

Two of the companies are Belgian - VEL NV of

Leuven and ISS Servisystem in Brussels. The

remaining two are based in the Netherlands:

Scansped in Tilburg and the Amsterdam office of

Diawa Europe. Diawa Europe is part of the

Japanese owned Diawa Bank, one of the largest

banks in the world. The actions were brought

following court ordered raids in the two countries.

BSA and VEL announced later that they had

reached an agreement and that the legal action

is to be dropped. VSA admitted running

unauthorized copies of software belonging to Lotus, Microsoft, WordPerfect, Symantec and

Central Point Software, and has agreed to pay an

undisclosed sum in compensation for damages. BSA described the agreement as “extremely

gratifying”, while noting that software piracy in the

Benelux region cost an estimated $600 million to

the software industry.

British financial institutions are rumoured to

be the next targets of the BSA.

Software glitch disrupts intercontinental air traffic

It was described as “a one in a million

software problem” but on 15 April it stopped the IBM 3080 mainframe computer used by the US Federal Aviation Administration’s Oakland Air

Route Traffic Center. The 150 minute outage

delayed a total of 72 flights at five different US

West Coast airports, as well as some aircraft

operations in both Hawaii and Australia.

The problem began when an IBM 3083 at a regional tracking station in California crashed and

temporarily removed identification labels from radar screens. Software was suspected and the

FAA decided to run diagnostics for a couple of

hours. Meanwhile planes increased their

separations from 3 to 20 miles, and air traffic controllers reverted to radio and manual flight

plan handling, Projects to improve the software

are underway, but are not expected to show

benefits for another two years.

Be/den Menkus

Hoechst faces privacy questions

The German company Hoechst faces allegations of privacy abuse after revelations that

01992 Elsevier Science Publishers Ltd 3