| Tuesday 01/27/04, 2:30 PST
Overall internet performance is running approximately
normal now, at noon pacific time overall Internet performance
was 8-10% slower than usual for a Tuesday. This is
not a significant change and would not be detectable
by the everyday user, and may simply reflect slight
traffic increases due to the worm propagation (approximately
5% of all emails received at Keynote are infected),
downloads of updated virus DAT files for corporate
and home users, and other related internet traffic.
Keynote does not expect the propagation of the worm
itself to have significant impact on the overall performance
of the Internet, as the number of emails being sent
by infected machines is only a small percentage of
normal email traffic.
BIG PICTURE
The major potential impact on overall Internet performance
may be on February 1st (Superbowl Sunday), when a payload
in the worm is scheduled to launch a denial-of-service
attack against the www.sco.com Web site. It may be
that Internet engineers will find a way to mitigate
this attack before it is automatically launched, as
they did in the case of the Blaster attack against
a Microsoft website. If no mitigation can be found,
traffic levels exceeding hundreds of millions of bits
per second are quite possible, with potentially dramatic
effects on Internet exchange points and backbone routers.
A second serious concern is the second payload included
in this worm, which allows a knowledgable hacker (not
just the person who wrote the worm) to take full control
of any infected computer. This control could be used
to compromise sensitive personal information (e.g.
passwords, credit card numbers, personal financial
information), or to use the infected computer as a
spam relay. All computer users need to ensure that
they have up-to-date virus protection software installed
and properly configured to protect themselves.
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