Virus Overwhelms Global Internet Systems

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WASHINGTON Jan. 25 —

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, although recovery efforts appeared to be succeeding.



Millions of Internet users in South Korea were stranded when computers at Korea Telecom Freetel and SK Telecom failed. Service was restored but remained slow, officials said. In Japan, NHK television reported heavy data traffic swamped some of the country's Internet connections, and Finnish phone operator TeliaSonera reported some problems.



"It's not debilitating," said Howard Schmidt, President Bush's No. 2 cybersecurity adviser. "Everybody seems to be getting it under control." Schmidt said the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center and experts at the CERT Coordination Center were monitoring the attack and offering technical advice to computer administrators on how to protect against it.



The FBI was searching for the possible origin of the latest attack, which experts variously dubbed "sapphire," "slammer" or "SQ hell." Some security researchers noted that the software unleashed in Saturday's attack bore striking resemblance to blueprints for computer code published weeks ago on a Chinese hacking Web site by a person who calls himself "Lion." An FBI spokesman said he couldn't confirm that.



Most home users did not need to take any protective measures. Experts said the attack bore remarkable similarities to the "Code Red" virus that struck the Internet during the summer of 2001.



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 was scanning for victim computers so randomly and so aggressively sending out thousands of probes a second that it saturated many Internet data pipelines.



Schmidt said disruption within the U.S. government was minimal, partly because the attack occurred early on a weekend. The departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce and some units within the Defense Department appeared hardest hit within the government, according to Matrix NetSystems Inc., a monitoring firm in Austin, Texas.



"This is like Code Red all over again," said Marc Maiffret, an executive with eEye Digital Security, whose engineers were among the earliest to study samples of the attack software. "The sheer number of attacks is eating up so much bandwidth that normal operations can't take place."



"The impact of this worm was huge," agreed Ben Koshy of W3 International Media Ltd., which operates thousands of Web sites from its computers in Vancouver. "It's a very significant attack."



Koshy added that, about six hours after the attack started, commercial Web sites that had been overwhelmed were starting to come back online as engineers began effectively blocking the malicious data traffic. At the height of the attack, another company reported that computers were flooded with more than 125 megabytes of data every second.



"People are recovering from it," Koshy said.



Symantec Corp., an antivirus vendor, estimated that at least 22,000 systems were affected worldwide.



"Traffic itself seems to have leveled off a little bit, so likely only so many systems are exposed out there," said Oliver Friedrichs, senior manager with Symantec Security Response. The attacking software, technically known as a worm, was overwhelming Internet traffic-directing devices known as routers.



"The Internet is still usable, but we're definitely receiving reports from some of our customers who have had it affect their routers specifically," Friedrichs said.



The attack sought to exploit a software flaw discovered by researchers in July 2002 that permits hackers to seize control of corporate database servers. Microsoft deemed the flaw to be "critical" and offered a free repairing patch, but it was impossible to know how many computer administrators applied the fix.



The latest attack could revive debate within the technology industry about the need for an Internet-wide monitoring center, which the Bush administration has proposed.



During the Code Red attack in July 2001, about 300,000 mostly corporate server computers were infected and programmed to launch a simultaneous attack against the Web site for the White House, which U.S. officials were able to defend successfully.



Unlike that episode, the malicious software used in this latest attack did not appear to do anything other than try to spread its own infection, experts said.





AP technology writers Anick Jesdanun and Frank Bajak contributed to this story from New York.

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