Despite the FBI warning and the pathetically poor 'information' in the BBC and other News broadcasts, the Code Red Worm does not directly affect an ordinary desktop computer or Notebook.

It affects Internet Server computers only and affects users only by creating a lot of Internet traffic, thus slowing down your browsing or if it infects a web server with a web site that you view you may see the web page replaced temporarily by "Hacked by Chinese".

It also launches Denial-of-Service attacks against one (or possibly more) of the US Government Web Sites. Denial of Service attacks are done by launching many small requests at a server very rapidly to attempt to overload its reply capability. You can see that if a lot of Web Servers are infected by Code Red Worm and are all blasting away at a single site it will be well & truly overloaded.

This worm did attack my own demonstration web server, but it is easily stopped and removed once it is noticed.

Bill

Revised on 8/2/2001 12:16:03 AM