In the last 24 hours the SirCam worm has infected 510 computers in Australia alone, according to statistics on Trend Micro's free online scanner Web site. The anti-virus company has ranked the email worm as the most wide spread malicious code out there in circulation, more of a threat to home users than the Code Red variant could ever be.
Earlier this week, reports of a possible repeat of the Code Red epidemic caused a real panic amongst Internet users, according to anti-virus vendor Kaspersky.
-Virtually all messages concerning [Code Red II] that have been registered with us since the beginning of the week have come from home users, who worried about their computer security in vain," Kaspersky Labs head of corporate communications, Denis Zenkin, said.
The Code Red worm infects computers operating Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) with -the Indexing Service switched on", according to Kaspersky Labs.
Without down playing the harm Code Red can inflict, Kaspersky Labs says this configuration of software is used exclusively on special servers, and home computers and office workstations operating any Windows version (including Windows 2000) are not exposed to the [Code Red] attack.
In actual fact, there have been only a handful of reported infections from the second invasion of the Code Red worm in Australia, according to Trend Micro.
-So far they have been small web page operators without technical savvy of large corporations and ISPs. Most major ISP's are running their Web site on Unix-based platforms, and if it is run on a Windows platform, it's monitored 24/7," Trend Micro's Andrew Gordon told ZDNet.
The resurgence of the Code Red worm has distracted users from the real danger of the SirCam epidemic, which is said to have superseded the level of infection caused by the well known, -Loveletter" and -Melissa" viruses combined, according to Kaspersky Labs.
