The program is known as a "worm" because it travels across a network copying itself as it goes. The scanning attempts were reported to the Computer Emergency Response Team, which issued a security alert. System administrators who noticed hundreds of attempts to scan their machines went looking for the cause and found the cheese worm was the culprit. The worm may have gone unnoticed but for the zeal with which it scans for vulnerabilities. If cheese finds a vulnerable computer, it applies a software patch to close the hole, copies itself, and then uses the healed computer to look for other networks with the same vulnerability. Mail sent to the building will reach the firm it is addressed to, in the same way data sent to a server will be directed to a particular program. These can be thought of as resembling room numbers in a skyscraper, where separate companies reside on different floors inside one physical building. Individual web-aware programs wait for information addressed, or sent, to different ports. It scans networks with certain net addresses until it finds one with a back door, or port, that has been opened by the Lion worm.Ī port is a logical, as opposed to a physical, division within a computer system. The cheese worm attempts to repair some of the damage done by the Lion worm. This year, three viruses, the Ramen, lion, and Adore worms, have been written to attack this software. Usually, the target is overwhelmed by the stream of useless data and either crashes, or becomes unreachable by legitimate users.Īlthough viruses that exploit the weaknesses of Microsoft Windows are by far the most numerous, some malicious hackers have started to target the increasingly popular Linux software. The backdoors could be used to stage denial-of-service attacks that use a series of remotely commanded computers to bombard a target server with bogus requests. The Linux mascot penguin: An increasingly popular target
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