[Ansteorra-announce] Expect erratic Internet service for the next few days

[Michael Tucker]

Greetings:

Just a "heads up" to everyone to expect erratic Internet service for the next
few days. Someone has released a "worm", a malicious computer program, that is
spreading like wildfire throughout the Internet as I write this. Its purpose is
to 1) reproduce itself on as many Microsoft IIS servers as possible, 2) deface
the Web sites hosted by those servers to say "Hacked by Chinese!", then 3)
attack www.whitehouse.gov. I doubt the attack on the White House Web site will
succeed (especially since they undoubtedly know about it by now), but the
Internet is at the leading edge of a tidal wave of data[1] which is sure to clog
the pipes of the Internet until the worm can be neutralized[2].

Please be extra kind to your Internet administrators (especially Pug) for the
next few days. :-)

Yours,
Michael Silverhands
Virtual scribe, Stargate

[1] Estimated at least 300,000 already infected machines, which will transmit
about 400 megabytes *each* every 4.5 hours or so beginning tomorrow. Besides the
effect on the IIS servers, much of the equipment that relays information on the
Internet (routers, etc.) doesn't like the data in the attack and is being shut
down by it. Administrators are reporting that Internet connectivity has been
going up and down in parts of northern California and New York.

[2] There is already a patch from Microsoft (an *amazingly* fast turnaround for
them) that neutralizes the attack, but the "data storm" will continue until the
vast majority of IIS server administrators (all over the world) apply the patch.