The Code Red viruses were very, very sneaky worms.
They didn't require you to do
anything to become infected (you didn't need to open an attachment or
download a file); all it took was an active Internet connection for the
virus to take advantage of a flaw in the Windows operating system. And
what did the viruses do?
Well, for one, they turned your
computer into a slave, letting someone offsite operate it remotely. That
means they could steal what was on your computer or even use your
computer to do some bad things…like, say, overloading the White House
computers by telling all the infected computers to contact its address.
Luckily, the government was able to
shift to another address to escape the attack, but other servers weren't
so lucky. In the end, over 200,000 servers were hit by the Code Red
virus in 2001.
No comments:
Post a Comment