Havasu Doug
Pisces
HDF Gold Supporter
Delta Tau Chi - ΔTX
  
North Padre Island, Texas
Posts: 12,188
APPD 1.52
Post Rank: 7
'78 Challenger jet
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Posted: Jan. 25 2003,6:58 pm |
Post # 9 |
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| Quote | Originally posted by RiverKitty:
Virus Overwhelms Global Internet Systems
Sat Jan 25,10:52 AM ET Add Technology - AP to My Yahoo!
By TED BRIDIS, AP Technology Writer
WASHINGTON - Traffic on the Internet slowed dramatically for hours early Saturday, the effects of a fast-spreading, virus-like infection that overwhelmed the world's digital pipelines and broadly interfered with Web browsing and delivery of e-mail.
Sites monitoring the health of the Internet reported significant slowdowns globally, although recovery efforts appeared to be succeeding.
Millions of Internet users in South Korea (news - web sites) were stranded when computers at Korea Telecom Freetel and SK Telecom failed. Service was restored but remained slow, officials said. In Japan, NHK television reported heavy data traffic swamped some of the country's Internet connections, and Finnish phone operator TeliaSonera reported some problems.
"It's not debilitating," said Howard Schmidt, President Bush (news - web sites)'s No. 2 cybersecurity adviser. "Everybody seems to be getting it under control." Schmidt said the FBI (news - web sites)'s National Infrastructure Protection Center and experts at the CERT Coordination Center (news - web sites) were monitoring the attack and offering technical advice to computer administrators on how to protect against it.
The FBI was searching for the possible origin of the latest attack, which experts variously dubbed "sapphire," "slammer" or "SQ hell." Some security researchers noted that the software unleashed in Saturday's attack bore striking resemblance to blueprints for computer code published weeks ago on a Chinese hacking Web site by a person who calls himself "Lion." An FBI spokesman said he couldn't confirm that.
Most home users did not need to take any protective measures. Experts said the attack bore remarkable similarities to the "Code Red" virus that struck the Internet during the summer of 2001.
The virus-like attack, which began about 12:30 a.m. EST, sought out vulnerable computers on the Internet to infect using a known flaw in popular database software from Microsoft Corp., called "SQL Server 2000." But the attacking software was scanning for victim computers so randomly and so aggressively — sending out thousands of probes a second — that it saturated many Internet data pipelines.
Schmidt said disruption within the U.S. government was minimal, partly because the attack occurred early on a weekend. The departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce and some units within the Defense Department appeared hardest hit within the government, according to Matrix NetSystems Inc., a monitoring firm in Austin, Texas.
"This is like Code Red all over again," said Marc Maiffret, an executive with eEye Digital Security, whose engineers were among the earliest to study samples of the attack software. "The sheer number of attacks is eating up so much bandwidth that normal operations can't take place."
"The impact of this worm was huge," agreed Ben Koshy of W3 International Media Ltd., which operates thousands of Web sites from its computers in Vancouver. "It's a very significant attack." |
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I didn't normally open unexpected email attachments before, but all it takes is once. That particular email said it was from Havasu Barney, but I realize, now, that it was a disguise and Barney had nothing to do with it. It took about 6 days to get rid of it and I had to reload about 20 programs. 