Code Blue targets Red China

Stand by for Code Blue, a cunning new worm which seeks out systems infected by Code Red and reprogrammes them to launch against targets based in mainland China.

Code Blue exploits a Web traversal vulnerability in Microsoft's IIS Web server first discovered in October 2000, and has infected several systems in China, according to reports.

The infection mechanism for the worm, whose active parts pose as normal Windows files, involves disinfecting remnants of Code Red from targeted systems.

In particular, Code Blue changes the processing of specialised HTTP-requests to make it impossible for Code Red to reinfect an IIS server in the future, according to an analysis of the worm by Kaspersky Labs.

The worm, which could potentially infect systems untouched by Code Red, has a payload which attempts to perform a denial of service attack on www.nsfocus.com, the Web site of a Beijing-based security consultancy. ®

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External Links

Link to MS patch for IIS "Web Server Folder Traversal" Vulnerability