'Code Red' virus fails to wreak havoc after much hype

JAKARTA (JP): The much hyped computer virus, Code Red, failed to wreak havoc on Internet systems in Indonesia and other countries on Wednesday, the day it was scheduled to attack for the second time this month.

PT Agranet Multicitra Siberkom (Agrakom), which operates the popular Detikcom online news portal, said it had not detected any unusual activities with its Internet system.

"If anything should happen, it should happen this morning, but so far nothing out of the ordinary has occurred," Agrakom's infrastructure coordinator Achmad Ulfi told The Jakarta Post.

However, he said that the company has always taken precautions against the possibility of a computer virus attack by always installing the latest anti-virus software on their system.

The virus, categorized as a worm by computer experts, infiltrates a server and then fills the machine's memory with meaningless computer codes. Just before the server crashes, the worm is passed on to other vulnerable computers.

A virus generally ruins the system which it has infected, while a worm doesn't. Instead, it disrupts the system's function, such as by defacing websites and launching a data flood that could overwhelm servers, computer expert Zatni Arbi told the Post.

The Code Red virus -- named after the cherry flavored caffeine soft drink popular with computer programmers -- only attacks servers running on Microsoft's Internet server software such as Windows NT and 2000, and the IIS Web server software.

Microsoft has issued a patch for administrators to protect their servers. More than one million copies of the patch have been downloaded, the AFP newswire reported.

Individual computers not running the server software are immune to the worm, including the vast majority of individual home and business users.

"Our server for Agrakom has already been protected with the latest software patch from Microsoft," he said, quickly adding that the company periodically updates its computer systems to prevent virus threats.

Scheduled to attack the Internet at midnight Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on Tuesday, the Code Red virus has also failed to disrupt Internet systems in the United States.

"Everything is looking normal," Dan Berkowitz, a spokesman for Keynote Systems, was quoted as saying by the newswire. Keynote Systems is an Internet performance monitoring company based in San Mateo, California.

The first worm attack occurred on July 19, affecting more than 250,000 systems in just nine hours. The attack tried to overwhelm the White House website with data requests, but U.S. government programmers thwarted the virus by moving the White House web pages to a new Internet address just in time.

Though the worm did not strike immediately on Wednesday (Tuesday, U.S. time), Berkowitz said the new worm attack could cause problems in the next few days, as it works its way around the Internet.

"There could be a cumulative effect," he said. "It's best to stay cautious."(tnt)