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By Joey Gardiner, 2 August 2001 15:26

NEWS Code Red - the worm we were told was going to bring the internet to halt - has so far proved to be the biggest damp squib since the Y2K bug. The malicious code, which US federal agencies claim has infected 300,000 computers and could have halved the performance of the internet, has failed to have any significant effect since it came out of hibernation yesterday. While security experts body SANS Institute claimed Code Red has infected 178,000 servers at the latest count, web-monitoring firm Keynote claimed there had been no noticeable depreciation in internet performance. The failure of the worm to infect a significant number of computers after the 01:00(BST) time it was scheduled to attack led some observers to dismiss the virus. However, the worm did eventually rear its head on Wednesday, and at one point looked to spiral out of control as the number of new infections doubled every hour. At one point over 20,000 new servers were contracting the virus every 60 minutes. But by late Wednesday night the levels of infection had fallen again and the immediate threat looked to have been averted. Code Red exploits a hole in Microsoft's web server software IIS and prompted a massive awareness-raising circus when it became clear the program was due to start re-infecting computers on 1 August. A joint press conference between Microsoft and US government to spread news about the worm prompted a global - some say hysterical - public reaction. This was despite the fact most that home users can not be infected as it does not target PCs. Federal agencies claimed web-performance was reduced by 40 per cent by the initial outbreak of the worm because of the enormous amount of traffic it generated. However, others (http://www.silicon.com/a46172 ) have questioned the validity of this data and say the whole thing has been over-hyped. The code still has 18 days left to propagate itself before again falling dormant on 20 August, as it did last month.