Code Red Moving at Snail's Pace

N E W   Y O R K, Aug. 2 -- The Code Red worm continued to crawl around the Internet today, but computer experts say its pace has become, well, sluggish.

"We are cautiously optimistic that the impact of the infection stage of this particular variant of the Code Red worm, which we will call Version 2, has been minimized," said Jeff Reed, a staff member at the CERT Coordination Center of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. "However, not all harm has been averted."

Although estimates of Code Red's spread vary, it appears that more than 200,000 computers worldwide have been infected by it in the last two days, a number approaching the extent of the worm's scope when it first surfaced in July.

Still, Reed said, the speed of Code Red's proliferation had decreased markedly today: "Although we continue to see an increase in the number of computers that are being infected by Version 2, the rate of increase is slowing down."

How to protect your computer from Code Red

Pentagon Shut Down Sites

On Wednesday evening, the Pentagon was forced to shut the public out of many Defense Department Web sites in response to the worm.

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At the same time, a number of Defense Department sites — including the DefenseLINK gateway — were open.

Code Red was first detected July 19, when it infected an estimated 300,000 computers using Microsoft's Windows 2000, Windows NT or Internet Information Server version 4.0 or 5.0., and launched an attack on the White House's Web site.

That attack was foiled, although the Pentagon also temporarily shut down its Web sites the next week to install protection against the worm.

Code Red then went into a period of dormancy, but began infecting computers again after its reactivation on Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET.

The damage wrought by Code Red has been limited in part because computers using Microsoft's Windows 98 or Windows 95, or using any of Apple's Macintosh operating systems, are not vulnerable to the the worm, which is intended to create outages on major Web sites, slowing down Internet traffic in the process.