Traffic on the many parts of the Internet slowed dramatically for hours early Saturday, the apparent effects of a fast-spreading, virus-like infection that overwhelmed the world's digital pipelines and interfered with Web browsing and delivery of e-mail.

Dubbed the Sapphire Worm, or SQL Slammer, this exploit does not affect home computers; rather, it targets web servers running Microsoft's SQL Server. Although Slammer is not destructive to an infected host (like Code Red it only exists in memory), it generates a damaging level of network traffic when it scans for additional targets.

South Korea was hit particularly hard, with most of the nation's Internet users unable to access Web sites for nearly half the day, according to reports. Japan and other high-technology Asian areas were also hard-hit. In the US overnight, five of the Internet's 13 route DNS servers were down and two others had latencies of more than 10 seconds.  more...

25 January 2003  |   permalink