Fascinating info----I found this on the About.com website:
Code Red Goes Splat
Whitehouse squishes wily worm
If the enemy is coming straight at you, what do you do? Sidestep it,
of course.
Which is exactly what www.whitehouse.gov did to win round
one of the worm wars. Simply by changing their IP address, the web's
version of a phone number, the FBI sent the not so wily worm spiraling down
a blackhole in cyberspace.
An oversight in Code Red worm's code left it targeting a single IP
address for
the Whitehouse website. The simple change of the IP address makes
it appear to Red as if no one is home. The lonely echo of silence
prevents the worm from sending its datapackets, thereby stopping a potentially
crippling denial of service attack that couldhave affected a significant
portion of the
Internet.
This doesn't mean Code Red is through. The worm is programmed to bushwhack
the Whitehouse for seven days or through the end of the month. When the new
month begins, Code Red reportedly will revert back to mass infection mode,
repeating the cycle indefinitely. Because the worm constantly scans random IP
addresses looking for vulnerable systems, even non-vulnerable home PC
users can
feel the affect of the disruptive probes.
Could there be an upside to the antics of wily worm? It might spur system
administrators to more closely heed security warnings and patch their systems
when necessary. Indeed, even Microsoft® may learn to do so after having
their very
own Microsoft® IIS servers fall victim to Code Red. Perhaps the greatest
irony is that some may have been prevented from obtaining the very update
needed as the Redmond giant succumbed to wily
worm.
Camilla Flintermann,
Oxford, Ohio
<[log in to unmask]>
on the web at http://www.geocities.com/camillahf/index.html
and also at
http://members.tripod.lycos.nl/genugten/flinterm.htm
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
# " Nothing is as inevitable #
# as a mistake whose time is come." #
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
----------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn
