August 16, 2005
The Zotob worm shut down Windows 2000 operating systems around the country today, including the computers at CNN, ABC, and the New York Times.
Take a look at this article from Outside The Beltway Blog. Here is an excerpt.
A computer worm shut down computer systems running Windows 2000 software across the United States on Tuesday, hitting computers at CNN, ABC and The New York Times. Around 5 p.m. computers began crashing at CNN facilities in New York and Atlanta. ABC said its problems began in New York about 1:30 p.m. The Caterpillar Co. in Peoria, Illinois also was reportedly affected.
David Perry of Trend Micro said that the attack seems to have been triggered by a new worm, called worm--rbot.ebq. He said the symptoms -- computers repeatedly shutting down and rebooting -- was consistent with that virus. Johannes Ullrich, director of the Sans Institute, a network security firm in Jacksonville, Florida, said the outage also may have been caused by the Zotob worm, which was released last weekend. "It will connect to a control server to ask for instructions. It scans network neighborhoods and tries to infect them, as well," Ullrich said.
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