A potentially devastating internet virus has failed to disrupt the web site “WhiteHouse.gov” following precautionary action by US government network administrators. The worm known as “Code Red” had been programmed to bombard the White House web site with so much data that it would leave it inaccessible. However, the action taken meant that the worm could not make a necessary connection with the web site and so was not triggered to send the data.

The first reports of the “Code Red” worm were made last week when it was detected by network administrators. The worm takes advantage of a security hole in Microsoft software, which the company had acknowledged in June when it issued a patch to users so that their systems would not be vulnerable to attack.

An advisory report has been issued by the Computer Emergency Response Team Co-ordination Center (“CERT”) warning that a successful attack may have knock-on effects for the entire internet. It reads:

“In addition to web site defacement, infected systems may experience performance degradation as a result of the scanning activity of this worm.

“Non-compromised systems and networks that are being scanned by other hosts infected by the "Code Red" worm may experience severe denial of service. This occurs because each instance of the "Code Red" worm uses the same random number generator seed to create the list of IP addresses it scans. Therefore, all victim hosts scan the same IP addresses.”

Reports have also been made of a second worm named “SirCam” that has the ability to pick individual documents from the “My Document” directory in Windows software and then to send it to all entries in the users e-mail address book. This poses a clear threat to user privacy and organisations have been advised to ensure they have strong e-mail security policies in action to prevent its further spread.

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