By Joey Gardiner, 20 July 2001 13:00
NEWS A worm dubbed "Code Red" is causing increasing headaches for IIS servers across the web and has threatened to launch a denial of service attack against the US White House website. The worm attacks Microsoft web servers or IISs - internet information servers - and, if successful, defaces the related web page with the text "Welcome to http//:www.worm.com! Hacked by Chinese!" The worm then creates an IP address, randomly chosen from a list of prescribed websites and posts itself on. The worm has been programmed to alter its behaviour at today's date and deflect its attention to infecting the http://www.whitehouse.gov url. Security experts think the aim is to force a denial of service attack on the US government site, with all infected servers suddenly bombarding it with the malicious code. However, initial reports suggest that the government site has managed to resist the attack. An advisory note from security experts CERT said the worm has already infected over 225,000 servers. The worm only affects systems running an English language (US) versions of Windows NT or Windows 2000. A patch is available from Microsoft for the worm at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/.
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