20 September 2001
National Australia Bank was hit by a computer virus yesterday, shutting down the phone, Internet and share-trading services of the nation's biggest bank.
A spokeswoman for NAB could not confirm whether the virus was the World Trade Centre bug, also dubbed ``WTC", which has played havoc with computer systems around the world.
A virus called ``Nimda" could also have been to blame. Nimda assaulted various global networks yesterday, infecting some sections of Microsoft's Japanese-language Internet site.
Nimda had some similarity to last month's ``Code Red" virus, and was a worm that made its way through computers via e-mails and the Web.
The danger of the virus to world financial markets led United States Attorney-General John Ashcroft to issue a warning about the new bug.
``The virus could be more active than the Cod Red virus, which snarled computers worldwide in July," he said.
Mr Ashcroft said there was as yet no evidence to link this infection to the terrorist attack of last week.
Locally, all three NAB services were frozen for most of the day, shutting out thousands of customers from accessing important financial information relating to deposits and loans, and slowing share trades by National clients.
The NAB spokeswoman said the phone-banking service resumed operation in the late evening, and that the other two units should be running again by late last night.
Customers of NAB's phone-banking service were greeted with a recorded message in the morning stating an unusual volume had temporarily jammed the system. By the afternoon, that message had been replaced with a one saying the system was out of order.
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