According to the source, the system administrator who maintains the infrastructure of the financial institution became interested in the ideas of the SETI project, a computer program that analyzes radio signals from space and looks for signs of extraterrestrial life. Its essence is that everyone voluntarily joins the global network, providing the power of their computer. In this case, the network can handle a larger data stream.

What happened?

The employee decided to connect the entire banking infrastructure to the SETI network. In addition, he had access to a software development lab that housed many powerful computers.

All that computing power was mostly idle at night, so I decided to donate it to science by downloading the SETI client and setting it up to run.
– says the man whose name the publication does not mention, and the bank where he works.

After a while, he saw his network rise significantly in the SETI program rankings and was proud of his contributions to science. It entered the top 100 in its first week. But after a while the problems started.

About two weeks later, one Monday morning, I got a call from my boss asking if I could come early because there were reports of a massive virus attack going on.
– says.

The system administrator came to the office and heard the boss’s story: The bank’s entire computer system is infected with a virus that consumes 100% of CPU power. He immediately understood which “virus” we were talking about. His scenario of shutting down SETI in the morning didn’t work, and the system was looking for aliens at full capacity at the time the bank was supposed to be up and running. It turned out that the day before, technical work was done on the network that interfered with the scenario.

After that, the man decided that he was fed up with science and left the bank from SETI. The bank has decided not to take this case out of the company and register everything as an “anomaly”.