A Tale of Two Viruses

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of information, it was the age of the computer virus, it was the epoch of cyberspace, it was the epoch of frustration, it was the season of productivity, it was the season of deleted files, it was the spring of back-ups, it was the winter of despair--in short, the period was so far like the present period--in fact, it was just last week--that some of its noisiest authorities--media outlets throughout the world-- insisted we all brace ourselves for Code Red.

Nothing New Under The Sun

The virus or more accurately, the worm, nicknamed "Code Red," was reportedly spreading out if control, compromising at least 280,000 hosts by last week according to the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Code Red takes advantage of a well-known security vulnerability on Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000 machines running Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). The worm basically rewrites all web sites visited so they look as if they've been defaced. "Welcome to http: //www.worm.com !," the webpage reads instead and adds, "Hacked By Chinese!" The worm also launches a denial of service attack against the White House's web site. This was viewed as such huge threat, the White House decided to change its numeric IP address to avert the attack. While the White House may have won this round, the media is warning of a second wave of attacks, so massive they may bring the entire Internet to its knees! Can anyone spell Y2K?

Silence is Golden

While the media, dry of a major virus story since Anna Kornikova hit last winter, was anxiously hyping up imageries of this Chinese Apocalyptic Cyber-Invasion another virus was silently making the rounds. As it tiptoed around the Internet it slowly began to build up speed. So by the time it topped the infamous "Love Letter" virus on Anti-Virus Company Trend Micro's list of Top Ten Most Prevalent Viruses During the Past 30 Days it was "old news" already. But this virus-worm breed, self-named "SirCam," has the potential to do far more damage to the Internet than the media has been giving it credit. The Symantac AntiVirus Research Center (SARC) recently upgraded SirCam from a level 3 to a level 4 threat, while CodeRed, originally a only a level 2 threat is now holding at level 3. (Since 2000 only 5 other viruses have been considered a level 4 threat. No virus since 2000 has ever received a level 5 rating, the highest threat rating.)

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