"Code Red" worm could re-emerge

WASHINGTON: The "Code Red" computer worm, which infected 300,000 computers and disrupted several US government Web sites last week, could soon wreak more havoc on the Internet, government and high-tech officials warned on Sunday.

The computer worm, which first surfaced on July 19, is set to re-emerge on Tuesday evening in a possibly more powerful form, according to an advisory released by Microsoft Corp., the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, and several other groups.

The groups planned to discuss Code Red at a press conference on Monday. Code Red, named by computer programmers for a favorite soft drink, lodges itself on server computers that then are instructed to blitz government Web sites with data. Some of the infected Web sites display the message "Hacked by Chinese!"

While the White House Web site managed to avoid disruption on July 19, the Pentagon cut off public access to most of its Web sites on July 23 to guard against the worm.

Officials anticipated that Code Red, which has infected at least 300,000 computer servers, could slow down Web traffic substantially when it re-emerges on Tuesday at 8 PM Eastern time (0001 GMT Wednesday), the advisory said. Computers running Microsoft Windows NT or Windows 2000 systems and Microsoft's Internet Information Server software version 4.0 or 5.0 are vulnerable to infection, the advisory said.

In order to limit the worm's impact, the advisory recommended that vulnerable users visit http://www.digitalisland.net/codered/ for instructions on how to download a software patch.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.