br23 blog - minsk, belarus

For the first time ever I’ve tried online banking on 26.04.2002 (which incidentally was also the 16th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe, and a date when Chernobyl computer virus usually activates itself). It felt weird: one mouse click — and in a glimpse 750 euro went away from my account.

Since then I’ve got totally used to it. I find it almost indispensable, paying my bills, while sitting comfortably in front of my computer, without having to visit the branch, stay in line and fill out forms.

In 2002, I also shortly worked on a prototype of an online banking application that our company was hoping to sell to Postbank and other banks. That gave me an opportunity to learn a bit from the inside how it really works.

There’s no doubt, online banking is the way, it is the future. And it’s the people’s factor which is to blame in most cases. My wife had such an amazingly awful, A-W-F-U-L, unprofessional service at the Deutsche Bank in Germany. It makes me nervous just to think back about all those nasty problems she had to deal with in her Deutsche Bank branch.

—

And speaking about Chernobyl/CIH virus, in case anyone curious about this old bastard… The classic virus-detection techniques look for the presence of a virus-specific sequence of instructions (called a virus signature) inside the program: if the signature is found, it is highly probable that the program is infected. The Chernobyl/CIH virus is detected by checking for the hexadecimal sequence:

E800 0000 005B 8D4B 4251 5050
0F01 4C24 FE5B 83C3 1CFA 8B2B

This corresponds to the following IA-32 instruction sequence, which constitutes part of the virus body:

call 0h
pop ebx
lea ecx, [ebx + 42h]
push ecx
push eax
push eax
sidt [esp - 02h]
pop ebx
add ebx, 1Ch
cli
mov ebp, [ebx]

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And, by the way, Chernobyl topic is back in the headlines again these days because of a VIP conference in Vienna. The UN and IAEA downplayed the death toll, and said that it’s the psychological stress and poverty which is to blame for shorter life spans, not the radiation. Of course, the UN report conclusions were met with outrage in Belarus. But I, personally, don’t know who is right. I haven’t read the documents. Still, I’m more inclined to believe the scientists rather than politicians, but on the other hand IAEA is an interested party, with a clear bias…

The UN report claims that the total number of people who died due to Chernobyl accident is not more than 4000. For example, read this article on VOA or search Google News for keywords like Chernobyl and Vienna.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 11:24 am and is filed under Personal, Deutschland, Hi-tech, Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.