Dell production line crippled by virus attack

Dell Computer has admitted it was forced to suspend all production at its Limerick manufacturing plant for four days because it was hit by the FunLove virus.

One Silicon.com viewer was told by the company that the virus had forced it to recall 12,000 machines across all product ranges.

Dell uncovered the problem on Thursday after the FunLove virus was discovered in its production systems. The FunLove virus affects computers running on Windows NT - which when opened gives victims the message "Fun Lovin' Criminals" before trying to shut the system down.

Dell was originally concerned that up to 12,000 products may have been infected by the virus; however, now that checks have been completed, Dell has claimed that no machines have been infected by the virus. This figure includes the 500 potentially suspect machines which had already reached customers. The company stresses that these have been returned or checked by their new owners themselves.

The computer company claims that production was only put back two days, and they are now working round the clock to prevent further delays to customers.

Dell confirmed that it had been in contact with Symantec, and that the systems security specialist had provided Dell with a fix. Symantec was unavailable to comment on the matter.

Graham Cluley, senior technical consultant for Sophos Anti-Virus said that the case underlined the damage that viruses could do, without being directly destructive to files. "Sometimes it is not the damage they do in terms of deleting files, it's the downtime and running around they force you to do to clean up".

Dell refused to comment on the cost of the halt to production, but dismissed reports putting the value at £14m to be "wildly exaggerated".

However Kevin Prouty, senior research analyst at AMR Research said: "The cost of something like this is enormous... even one machine at a factory can cost five to six thousand dollars if it is down, so for something like this, it could be a million dollars a day. There is also the loss of prestige and reputation which is just as important."