Fergie's Tech Blog

Worm Attacks Visa HQ in California

Via Red Herring.

After creeping through computer networks at some of the largest U.S. media organizations, a variant of the Zotob worm attacked hundreds of computers at Visa International’s headquarters in California, forcing some employees to head home Wednesday as technicians scrambled to sanitize its computers.

“Like a lot of businesses, we were impacted, too,” said Colin Baptie, a spokesperson for Visa. “We did apply the security patch and there has been no impact on our business.”

Visa declined to give any further details on the extent of the impact or why the operation in Foster City, California, was affected. Microsoft released a security patch for the worm on August 9, but it wasn’t clear what variant of the worm hit the Visa network.

Visa International is the world’s largest payment system, with more than 1 billion credit and other payment cards in circulation and 22,000 member banks. Visa was impacted by one of the six variants of the Zotob worm that has been in circulation since Sunday.

posted by Fergie @ 8/17/2005 12:36:00 PM