Mgz and Shark7 both used our newssubmit to tell us that a new virus, called SQL Slammer, spread through the Internet over the weekend. The worm attacks Microsoft's database software and has caused some cash machines to stop issuing money, South Korea going offline and slowing some Internet traffic in the United States:
Bank of America said 13,000 of its ATMs refused to dispense cash. In South Korea, the country's largest ISP, KT, said all almost all its customers lost their connections during the attack. Chinese computer users saw sites freeze and a dramatic slowdown in download speeds, as the worm's effects hit the Internet's nameservers--the computers that translate Web addresses into numerical Internet Protocol addresses. And all this in just 376 bytes of code, meaning the entire SQL Slammer worm code is about half the length of this paragraph. |
Anti-virus firm F-Secure said the effects were so marked because the worm generates massive amounts of network packets, overloading servers and routers and slowing down network traffic. "As many as five of the 13 Internet root nameservers have been downed because of the outbreak," the company said in an alert.
'SQL Slammer' takes advantage of a bug that was discovered last July in Microsoft's SQL Server database software. Although a patch has been available since then, many system administrators have failed to install the patch.. Read the complete article here.
Source: News.com
