The Code Red worm goes

The Code Red worm goes active today. Even though a patch has been available since May 1(see the story at Wired News) many servers have not been patched. The problem is so bad that the FTC is proposing a regulation that would require financial services companies to patch their servers.

The thing is that many servers are running IIS and don’t even know it. If you are using Windows, the machine you are using right now may have a copy of IIS running. To find out, open a Web browser and type “localhost” (without the quotes). If a Web page opens, you have a Web server running.

And the problem may not go away. The only reason that email worms die out is that the people that are infected experience negative effects. Mail servers slow to a crawl so administrators patch the holes. People see the attached messages in their inbox, so they delete them and update their virus protections. The difference with this worm is that many people don’t even know their servers are affected. The worm doesn’t harm the machine it infects. Instead, it searches for new machines to infect and then all the infected machines perform a denial of service attack on a target. Last time the target was www.whitehouse.gov, but that may change.