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CNN Live Sunday

Code Red Warm Will Strike Tonight

Aired August 19, 2001 - 17:09   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.
STEPHEN FRAZIER, CNN ANCHOR: The Code Red computer worm is expected to go into its attack mode tonight. It has affected thousands of computers, but the FBI says a public awareness campaign will make this latest attack much less damaging. We are frightened enough about it to have asked Allison Tom to come in and explain it all to us. She's here now on her day off to give us a little more information.

ALLISON TOM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: My pleasure to be here.

FRAZIER: Thanks, Allison.

TOM: Good, yes, that's exactly it. A lot of experts who have been following this are specifically trying to make sure and find out how damaging it could be, but because so many people have been following this, we have seen the attacks in the past couple of months, it is not expected to be a huge, major, catastrophic event on the Internet.

Now, the main Web site that is going to be impacted is the Whitehouse.gov site. We have it up here and we have been monitoring it very carefully and seeing that it is still working, so it is up and running, which is absolutely good.

And the reason that this Code Red computer, worm the way that it works is that it will try to infect computers, so it's very deep, sensitive. So, before first 19 days of the month, it will try to find computers that it can infect and then send that machine other ways to infect other computers. So, as you can imagine, it keeps multiplying.

On the 20th, you will see that it will start to send out a denial of service attack, and will try to infect other computers. Now, the way that many people have prevented this from happening is by going to Microsoft.com and installing a free patch that they have on their Web site. And this is something that a lot of consumers should do -- mostly businesses are the ones that are going to be affected or government Web sites as well.

And just to give you a little bit more of a highlight, if you go on this site on your own...

FRAZIER: You're going to Microsoft.com here now.

TOM: That's correct. And if you scroll go down here, you can see that it's specifically the Windows NT and the Windows 2000 systems that are the ones that are at most risk. If people at home, for instance, or businesses are running Windows 95, 98 or ME, they're not going to be jeopardized at all by this, so they don't have to worry about it.

FRAZIER: Much more popular with consumers.

TOM: Absolutely. These ones are, again, like I mentioned before, the NT and the 2000 systems are mainly for businesses and for governments.

And a lot of these other antivirus software vendors have the same patch offered for free for people to use, so you an easily do this on their Web sites. This one I'm pulling up here, just as an example, is McAffee.com, and they also detail all the specifics for this particular virus and how you can check to see whether your particular computer has been compromised or infected by this, and another one I bring up too is (UNINTELLIGIBLE), it's just another example where you can get a free patch.

FRAZIER: So, from what you just said -- let me interrupt you, Allison, if I may -- if I haven't followed your advice, if I'm in a business and I don't load on of these patches on, is there a way for me to find out whether this worm has, in fact, infected my system, my computer system?

TOM: Right, absolutely. And what we did is on the Microsoft.com Web site it will walk you through to show how you can figure out whether your system has been infected by this particular virus or not. So, it will walk you through. It takes just a couple of minutes to do, which is a very important thing.

I mean, the bottom line here, Stephen, is that anybody and everyone -- whether you're a business, government or consumer -- you should always have antivirus software updated on your computer.

FRAZIER: Great. Make me feel even less prepared now.

But if I understand what you were saying earlier, this is sort of like using everybody's telephone to call one number and try to jam the system up? Jam the White House?

TOM: Exactly, it's a very similar system. It's just essentially going to clog up the system, it could cause people to have some difficulty getting to certain Web sites, but so far, as we have been following it very closely, we haven't seen that happen.

FRAZIER: Allison Tom, thank for the update today, and I'm sure we will be turning to you as the hours after midnight count down.

TOM: We will be watching it closely, yes.

FRAZIER: Thanks very much.

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