Fears that the Code Red computer worm would cripple the Internet appeared to be entirely overblown today, leaving the IT community to wonder if a global call to arms worked or if the worm was merely a dud.
Computer experts across the globe saw no immediate effect from the worm that had been expected to begin winding its way through Web servers from the stroke of August 1.
Security professionals, the FBI and software giant Microsoft had urged IT experts to fortify their computer systems to prevent the spread of Code Red and the feared slow-down of the Internet. Some continued to warn today that the threat may not have completely disappeared, but the more dramatic warnings of a partial shut down of the Net were gone.
The worm, a software virus that affects computers running certain types of Microsoft operating systems, has struck twice before, hitting more than 350,000 computer servers, including some run by Microsoft.
But millions of computer users appeared better prepared this time, courtesy of a free software patch that catches the worm - named after a caffeine-laced drink favoured by computer programmers.
A Microsoft spokeswoman said that as of this morning more than one million patches had been downloaded; it appears the bulk of those were obtained in the past two days.
One research organisation has attempted an initial tally of the worm's economic costs. Computer Economics, based in California, estimated that Code Red has already cost an estimated $1.2 billion in damage to networks, ranking it below last year's Love Bug virus ($8.7 billion) but above the Melissa virus of 1999 ($1 billion) in terms of destructiveness.
The cost of clean-up, monitoring and checking systems for Code Red was near $740 million, Computer Economics said. The loss of productivity associated with the worm was near $450 million.
China - an early suspect because of the message 'Hacked by the Chinese!' initially flashed on some screens - was unaffected. The US government, which was the target of a previous averted attack by the worm, said it had not been affected and Asian governments told a similar story.
Code Red stealthily gains entry to Web servers that run on either Microsoft's Windows NT and Windows 2000 operating systems, and are equipped with Microsoft's Internet Information Services software. The worm was originally written to instruct the computers it infects to flood the White House Web site with messages and effectively shut it down. White House officials escaped that first attack on July 19 by changing the numeric Internet address of the site.
The real damage was predicted to happen when the worm began scouring the Net - as it was programmed to do at midnight - looking for similar Microsoft powered servers to infiltrate, and thus creating bottlenecks that would slow Net traffic down considerably.
