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.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) is expected to share his views about the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s prospects during his speech at the company’s 37th anniversary ceremony, as AI servers have become a new growth engine for the equipment manufacturing service provider. Lam’s speech is much anticipated, as Quanta has risen as one of the world’s major AI server suppliers. The company reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue to NT$1.41 trillion (US$43.35 billion) last year, thanks to fast-growing demand for servers, especially those with AI capabilities. The company told investors in November last year that
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) forecast that its wafer shipments this quarter would grow up to 7 percent sequentially and the factory utilization rate would rise to 75 percent, indicating that customers did not alter their ordering behavior due to the US President Donald Trump’s capricious US tariff policies. However, the uncertainty about US tariffs has weighed on the chipmaker’s business visibility for the second half of this year, UMC chief financial officer Liu Chi-tung (劉啟東) said at an online earnings conference yesterday. “Although the escalating trade tensions and global tariff policies have increased uncertainty in the semiconductor industry, we have not
Intel Corp has named Tasha Chuang (莊蓓瑜) to lead Intel Taiwan in a bid to reinforce relations between the company and its Taiwanese partners. The appointment of Chuang as general manager for Intel Taiwan takes effect on Thursday, the firm said in a statement yesterday. Chuang is to lead her team in Taiwan to pursue product development and sales growth in an effort to reinforce the company’s ties with its partners and clients, Intel said. Chuang was previously in charge of managing Intel’s ties with leading Taiwanese PC brand Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), which included helping Asustek strengthen its global businesses, the company
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
RSS