Security experts warned on Friday of a rapidly spreading virus designed to make computers launch attacks against the White House Web site.
A White House spokesman said officials were aware of the reports and were taking unspecified "preventive" measures.
The threat of the "Code Red" virus -- which attacks Web servers rather than PCs -- was serious enough to prompt a warning by the government-funded CERT Coordination Center and others.
CERT said the virus "may have already affected as many as 225,000 hosts and continues to spread rapidly" and may affect the performance of some networks.
Later Friday, experts said the number of computers affected had topped 300,000.
Experts said the Code Red virus has been spreading through a vulnerability in certain Microsoft Web servers. In infecting computers, the virus could create "zombies" that could be programmed to attack the White House or other sites.
"The Code Red worm takes advantage of a buffer overrun vulnerability, discovered last month, allowing the attacker to gain control over an affected server and deface websites, orchestrate denial of service attacks, reformat hard drives or perform other illegal acts," said the Information Technology Association of America.
"This is an extremely serious attack," said ITAA president Harris Miller.
The virus has defaced a number of websites, inserting the message, "Welcome to http://www.worm.com! Hacked by Chinese!" according to the security firm Symantec.
Elias Levy, chief technology officer at California-based SecurityFocus, said new variants of the virus were appearing that were rapidly infecting sites across the Internet.
Levy said that despite the message, it was not clear whether the virus had originated in China or was made to make people think it came from China.
"Other than the message and the fact that it attacks the White House, we have no indication that it is of Chinese origin," Levy said.
Entercept Security Technologies of San Jose, California, said the virus could launch denial of service attacks -- bombarding a site with useless information -- in the coming days.
The Code Red "worm" or virus was expected "to run denial-of-service attacks against www.whitehouse.gov, thereby defacing and crippling certain US government web sites," Entercept said.
Symantec said the virus is programmed to launch the attacks between July 20-28 "by sending large amounts of junk data to a port 80 [Web service] of 198.137.240.91, which is www.whitehouse.gov."
White House spokesman Jimmy Orr said the site -- which had been disrupted in attacks earlier this year -- had not been damaged as a result of the most recent threat.
In May, the White House acknowledged that the site had been temporarily shut amid a volley of attacks between Chinese and US hackers, but officials said they had not determined the source of the attacks.
"The White House Web site is online, we've taken some preventive measures aimed at minimizing any impact of computer viruses," Orr said.
Security experts said the White House most likely used a technique called "blackholing" to evade any attacks while switching to another Internet address.
In a move coinciding with the alert, US Attorney General John Ashcroft announced Friday the formation of 10 "highly specialized prosecutorial units" aimed at fighting crime in cyberspace, under the FBI's new National Infrastructure Protection Center.
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