[infowar.de] Code Red kamm aus China

[PatriciaDenno -! - aol - com]

Agence France-Presse 
WASHINGTON (September 2, 2001 11:42 p.m. EDT) - The Code Red computer virus 
that gummed up Web servers around the world probably originated at a 
university in China, a congressional report released Friday said.The Code Red 
virus "is believed to have started at a university in Guangdong, China," 
according to Keith Rhodes, the chief technologist for the General Accounting 
Office, Congress' investigative arm of Congress.Rhodes' testimony was given 
to a hearing Wednesday and released Friday by the GAO. He did not elaborate 
on the origin of the virus.But he said the virus can do damage to the global 
Internet infrastructure because it can "decrease the speed of the Internet 
and cause sporadic but widespread outages among all types of systems."He said 
that "the first version of Code Red created a randomly generated list of 
Internet addresses to infect. However, the algorithm used to generate the 
list was flawed, and infected systems ended up reinfecting each other. The 
subsequent versions target victims a bit differently, increasing the rate of 
infection."The so-called Code Red virus is categorized as a "worm" which 
invades servers and overwhelms their memory capacity, shutting them down just 
before the worm is passed to another computer.Servers are computers that pass 
data, such as Web pages and e-mail, across the Internet. Individual computers 
are not vulnerable to the attack.Some versions of the Code Red virus targeted 
attacks on the White House Internet server, although officials said no damage 
was done to the site.Separately, a California-based research group said over 
1 million servers were infected by the Code Red virus and that the economic 
loss from the infections was $2.6 billion dollars.Computer Economics said the 
cost of cleaning an inspecting servers was $1.1 billion and that $1.5 billion 
in productivity was lost.It figured the total impact of virus attacks around 
the world for 2001 has hit $10.7 billion