|
Code Red Worm Could Strike Again, Switzerland Hit
WASHINGTON, July 31 (News Agencies) - "Code Red," a powerful computer virus that targeted the White House earlier this month, may be ready to strike thousands of unsuspecting computers again after midnight Tuesday GMT, the U.S.'s FBI warned.
The virus has already hit Switzerland, attacking numerous well-known companies, a government spokesman said on Tuesday.
Claudio Frigerio from the Federal Office of Information and Telecommunications told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) that at least 10 web servers and their homepages had been infected.
Frigerio said the virus attacked Internet addresses using the suffix ".ch".
He said the virus also tried to infiltrate the Swiss government's system, but did little damage because an anti-virus system had already been installed.
In the U.S., Ronald Dick, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), estimates that the new attack, which is predicted to hit the U.S. later Tuesday, could affect about 1.5 million Internet addresses.
"We have indications that a number of infected machines are scanning the Web in search of new victims," Dick told reporters Monday. "If users act quickly, we could mitigate the impact of the virus."
The NIPC was created in 1998 in a bid to combat burgeoning cyber crime. Representatives of the information industry are taking part in its work.
In an alert to Internet users, the center said "Code Red" and its mutations "pose a continued and serious threat," particularly to Microsoft's Windows NT and 2000 and the IIS Web server software.
The new attack could begin when August 1st arrives in Greenwich, England, experts said.
Canada's Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Emergency Preparedness also alerted computer users on Monday, but said it "has not received any significant reporting from Canadian sources to indicate that their systems are or have been degraded by Code Red."
If the warning holds true, it would be the second "Code Red attack" on the Internet in less than two weeks.
On July 19th, the "Code Red" virus infected more than 250,000 systems in just nine hours, according to the NIPC.
It marshaled the infected computers in a coordinated attempt to overwhelm the White House website with data requests, but government programmers moved the White House web pages to a new Internet address just in time.
The virus scans the Internet, identifies vulnerable systems and infects those systems by installing itself, according to computer experts.
Each newly installed virus joins all the others, causing the rate of scanning to grow rapidly.
"This uncontrolled growth in scanning directly decreases the speed of the Internet and can cause sporadic but widespread outages among all types of systems," the NIPC warned.
"This spread has the potential to disrupt business and personal use of the Internet for applications such as electronic commerce, e-mail and entertainment."
To protect against the virus, the center recommends rebooting computers and installing a Microsoft security patch.
Clicking here can download the patch for Microsoft Windows NT version 4.0.
For Windows 2000 Professional, Server and Advanced Server, the patch can be obtained from
here.
"If individuals have information about the people that have committed this crime, we ask them to come forward," said Dick.
Experts say "Code Red" demonstrates the growing sophistication of programs used in computer attacks.
Stephen Trilling, director of research for Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center, said the increasing complexity of malicious programs reflects the increasing complexity of software in general. "Malicious hackers tend to be on the cutting edge of technology," he said.
|
