"Code Red" worm

[David Kelly]

The "Code Red" worm has been in the news a lot today and I was wondering what the chances are of it affecting CDF Don't know much about it. I'm sure others on here do. What do you think it will do?

[Nate Smith]

From the looks of the page I just found about it at go.com, it looks like it only affects IIS-based web servers, and as far as I know, this site is running on Apache, so everything should be as normal for chiefdelphi.com. Due to the nature of the 'net, however, expect some slowdowns as you get routed through effected machines on the way here...

[Mike Soukup]

Nate's right, chiefdelphi runs on Apache on Linux, and Code Red only affects WinNT and Win2000 servers running IIS. So the chances of it hurting CD is 0.

[David Kelly]

i feel a lot better now

[Joe Ross]

Like nate said, the Code Red worm only affects machines using IIS and haven't been updated with the latest security patches. There has been a patch for the vulnerability that the worm exploits for a while.

The other and more dangerous problem with the worm is how it propogates. The worm has a list of IP addresses that it is supposed to randomly pick from to attack. Unfortunately, the worm "randomly" picks the same IP address every time. The worm then uses the host computer to attack the computer it picked and then goes down the list.

Any of those computers near the top of the list are probably being pounded by many different copies of the worm. If one of those computers is between you and CD, you may not be able to get through, or at least much more slowly.

If CD was at the top of the list, even though it is running apache, it would probably still go down because of the traffic, but it looks like we are safe.