Code Red virus--it's for real

[Camilla Flintermann <flintec@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Fascinating info----I found this on the About.com website:

                             Code Red Goes Splat
                             Whitehouse squishes wily worm

       If the enemy is coming straight at you, what do you do? Sidestep it,
of course.
 Which is exactly what www.whitehouse.gov did to win round
one of the worm wars. Simply by changing their IP address, the web's
version of a phone number, the FBI sent the not so wily worm spiraling down
a blackhole in cyberspace.
       An oversight in Code Red worm's code left it targeting a single IP
address for
 the Whitehouse website. The simple change of the IP address makes
 it appear to Red as if no one is home. The lonely echo of silence
 prevents the worm from sending its datapackets, thereby stopping a potentially
  crippling denial of service attack that couldhave affected a significant
portion of the
   Internet.
This doesn't mean Code Red is through.  The worm is programmed to bushwhack
 the Whitehouse for seven days or through the end of the month. When the new
 month begins, Code Red reportedly will revert back to mass infection mode,
 repeating the cycle indefinitely. Because the worm constantly scans random IP
 addresses looking for vulnerable systems, even non-vulnerable home PC
users can
 feel the affect of the disruptive probes.

     Could there be an upside to the antics of wily worm? It might spur system
 administrators to more closely heed security warnings and patch their systems
 when necessary. Indeed, even Microsoft® may learn to do so after having
their very
 own Microsoft® IIS servers fall victim to Code Red. Perhaps the greatest
irony is that some may have been prevented from obtaining the very update
needed as the Redmond giant succumbed to wily
worm.







Camilla Flintermann,
                    Oxford, Ohio
                        <flintec@xxxxxxxxxx>

                 on the web at   
                and also at


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