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Virus Overwhelms Global Internet Systems
By TED BRIDIS
AP Technology Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Traffic on the Internet slowed dramatically for hours early Saturday, the effects of a fast-spreading, virus-like infection that overwhelmed the world's digital pipelines and broadly interfered with Web browsing and delivery of e-mail.
Sites monitoring the health of the Internet reported significant slowdowns globally. Experts said the electronic attack bore remarkable similarities to the "Code Red" virus during the summer of 2001 which also ground online traffic to a halt.
"It's not debilitating," said Howard Schmidt, President Bush's No. 2 cyber-security adviser. "Everybody seems to be getting it under control." Schmidt said the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center and private experts at the CERT Coordination Center were monitoring the attack and offering technical advice to computer administrators on how to protect against it.
Most home users did not need to take any protective measures.
The virus-like attack, which began about 12:30 a.m. EST, sought out vulnerable computers on the Internet to infect using a known flaw in popular database software from Microsoft Corp., called "SQL Server 2000." But the attacking software code was scanning for victim computers so randomly and so aggressively - sending out thousands of probes each second - that it saturated many Internet data pipelines.
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