[Tech] Alert: il worm Sasser si sta diffondendo rapidamente

Secondo molti esperti, il worm virus Sasser durante il week-end ha già infettato il 3% dei computer connessi a Internet - qualcosa come 18 milioni di PC.



A quanto pare il virus provoca il reboot del computer infetto, ripetendo poi l'operazione per alcune volte.

The worm, named Sasser, began to spread on Saturday, and unlike a virus does not travel through e-mails or attachments. It can spread by itself to any unprotected computer linked to the Internet.



It attacks through a flaw in recent versions of Microsoft's Windows -- Windows 2000 (news - web sites), Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP (news - web sites) -- and causes the computer to shut down, then rebooting it, repeating the process several times. But it appears to do no lasting damage.

A differenza della stragrande maggioranza dei virus tradizionali, Sasser non sfrutta l'e-mail e gli allegati di posta elettronica per diffondersi, ma lo fa autonomamente sfruttando una vulnerabilità presente (tanto per cambiare) nei seguenti sistemi operativi Microsoft: Windows 2000, Windows XP e Windows Server 2003 (ricordate la pubblicità internazionale di Microsoft? "Con Windows Server 2003 gli hacker diventeranno una specie in via di estinzione").



Con l'inizio della settimana lavorativa Sasser potrebbe iniziare a diffondersi in maniera incontenibile:

"Compared to other viruses which have appeared on weekends when activity is low -- doubly so now that May 1 is a holiday in many countries -- this one has positioned itself as one of the quickest-spreading and most virulent ones," Luis Corrons of PandaLabs, which has offices in Spain and the United States, said Sunday.



"All these signs make for a dark forecast for the beginning of the week when it is expected that the number of incidents will soar at the beginning of the work day."



"The problem seems to be getting worse," Mikko Hyppoenen, an anti-virus expert at F-Secure, a leading internet security firm, told AFP from Helsinki, adding that millions of computers worldwide may have been infected.



"We don't know how big this is going to be (but) we expect things to get much worse on Monday when people bring their laptops in to the office after the weekend," Hyppoenen said.



Since laptops are not protected by company firewall systems if used on a server other than the company's, they run the risk of being infected and in turn infect the company's network when used in the office.



"It seems to me an exaggeration to say that millions of computers have been affected," Bernard Ourghanlian, Microsoft's technical director in France, told AFP, where work was disrupted by the worm Saturday night.



But he acknowledged that the worm was spreading Sunday.



"We are recording at the moment several attacks a minute on 'honey pots' (computers deliberately left unprotected so they can monitor viruses)", he said, adding that France and some southeast Asian countries seemed to be particularly hit.



Microsoft made available a software update last month to fix the flaw exploited by the worm, and since mid-April several million copies have been downloaded.



"We have every hope the spreading of this virus will be limited by the many precautions we have taken," he said.

Insomma, chi ha scaricato e attivato la patch messa a disposizione in aprile da Microsoft dovrebbe essere al sicuro: gli altri faranno bene ad aggiornare i propri sistemi il prima possibile.



Fonte: Yahoo! News.