An employee introduced the SETI@home program to the bank’s computer system to analyze radio signals from space. This program used up all the free capacity of the bank network. It happened at the end of the 20th century – the beginning of the 21st century. The name of the bank was not disclosed.
Thanks to the power used, the system administrator became one of the highest rated participants in the project to search for extraterrestrial life. One day, an employee received a phone call from the bank and was told that there appeared to be a large-scale virus attack on the system. Management said the computers appeared to be infected with a virus that was consuming 100% of CPU power and spreading to every workstation and server of the partition where the sysadmin was running.
He, of course, immediately understood what was happening. “I needed to act quickly to avoid a mass panic, so I immediately ran the shutdown code on all equipment and eliminated the possibility of reboots, and also removed all software from the network,” the system administrator said.
As a result, the operation of the system was restored and management considered it an anomaly.
Source: Ferra
