Virus strikes Holden car plant

ADELAIDE - Holden has lost A$6 million ($6.58 million) in car production because of a computer virus which also caused major problems in the United States and Canada.

Holden was forced to shut down its vehicle assembly plant in Adelaide for several hours after its computer network was infiltrated by what was thought to be the Zotob virus.

About the same time, the virus hit at least two Canadian banks and several major businesses in the US, including DaimlerChrysler, ABC News, CNN, the New York Times and General Electric.

Holden said its systems were infiltrated early on Wednesday and the company stopped production until lunchtime.

The Zotob virus or worm functions by installing a program inside a user's Windows system.

It then downloads a copy of itself and scans for other machines that do not have a security patch to block it.

Once the worm finds another unprotected machine, the process repeats itself.

Zotob also opens a back door to the user's PC and adds several lines of code into a machine to prevent it from accessing certain antivirus websites. Microsoft has released a patch to deal with the problem.

Zotob affected various software programs at Holden, including those used to set up the computer chips in each car.

Spokesman David Ellis said the company would not comment on how the virus got into its computer network.

Technicians believed there were actually four or five different strains.

He said that they were still working to identify which particular strain had attacked the Holden systems.

Production was back to normal yesterday but investigations into the incident are continuing.

- AAP