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American Morning

Nine Hours to 'Code Red' Worm Strike

Aired July 31, 2001 - 11:22   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Who's afraid of a big, bad worm? In less than nine hours, we may see just how powerful this "Code Red" worm that runs in computers can be as we continue to follow this story and the possible -- possible -- Internet impact.

We are joined again by CNN technology editor Dan Sieberg, who's been following this with us for awhile now. Now, we're six, eight, maybe nine hours away from this thing actually happening. What's going on right now?

DAN SIEBERG, CNN TECHNOLOGY EDITOR: Exactly. Right now, the worm itself is sort of in sleep mode. There's a time cycle in all of this for when it's going to start to propagate itself and spread itself over the Internet. That's about 8:00 p.m. Eastern time. That doesn't that at 8:00 the Internet's just going to shut down; it's not going to be chaos instantly.

HARRIS: It's not another Y2K all over again.

SIEBERG: Exactly. It starts again the first of every month. 8:00 p.m. Eastern time is midnight Greenwich mean time; that's the first of the month. That's how this particular worm works. It's going to start up again. It could take some time for computer experts to see what kind of damage is being done. It really depends which corporations and businesses have prepared themselves for this outbreak, and that's what's going to determine how severe it's going to be.

HARRIS: The big fear, though, is that it may not necessarily make any systems crash or bring down any computer systems anywhere. It's just going to slow down the Internet. What will be the first tip-off that it is actually happening?

SIEBERG: A lot of major sites that are using this particular server software -- most home users aren't going to be affected by this particular worm; they're not going to be infected -- when they go to these sites that have the server software running -- it's a Microsoft product that has a vulnerability in it -- they may notice that they're slow, that they're down.

Some of them have a hacked message on the site that says "hacked by Chinese." That's an obvious way of knowing that that site's been affected. Other times, they may just have trouble getting to a particular site of their favorite place on the Web. HARRIS: One quick question: You say this comes up every month -- does that mean if we don't wipe it out entirely this time around it will come back automatically next month?

SIEBERG: It could, and that's what they are really hoping right now, to wipe it out. That's why they are putting the word out and making sure that these companies that have this setup are putting the patch in place to squash it, to stop the worm from spreading.

HARRIS: Dan Sieberg, thanks much for your expertise.

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