By Ron Coates, 30 May 2001 18:08
NEWS The growing popularity of Unix means it has finally become a mainstream target for virus writers. According to analysts and virus watchdog the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), there has been a significant increase in the number of self-propagating worms and active exploitation of vulnerabilities in Solaris, BIND and Microsoft IIS Top of the list in CERT's quarterly report is the sadmind/IIS worm, which CERT says has compromised over 500 Solaris machines in over 400 sites and defaced more than 6,000 IIS servers. But the action has been mostly in the US, according to security firm Sophos. Graham Cluley, senior technical consultant at Sophos, said: "We have had very few reports of sadmind. Corporate Unix customers are generally more careful about applying the patch. "But, we are seeing more Unix worms as the OS becomes more popular and attracts more virus writers. Most of them used to attack Microsoft systems." Patches are available through vendors and the cert.org site.
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