IT community feels the heat of Cyber attacks

Corporations are taking steps to protect computer networks after the strikes on the pentagon and the WTC, anticipating that the next attacks might be launched online, experts said. Although Indian companies, which are closely associated with US, were in shock this week, some executives did not waste any time in preparing for possible cyber attacks.

Recent times have seen cyber attacks following closely on the heels of international conflicts. In recent examples, there were numerous defacements of US websites after the April 1 collision between a Chinese jet fighter and the US surveillance plane and now after the attacks on US there has been an outbreak of electronic based attacks.

"Electronic attacks are even more easier to do as you do not have to be present at the situation for committing the crime worldwide. The Internet and the electronic community are a lot more vulnerable, you don't need a plane to attack an Internet connection," said, T Dileep, Director, RAS Infotech. The Hyderabad based company is into computer security and software development, the company is also working closely with Sophos, UK based company dealing in Internet security products.

There has been a change in the thinking of high-level executives towards the importance of computer security. "During the past three or four days I have received a number of calls regarding the current status of the virus and its after-effects," he added.


NIMDA-the malicious program includes a complicated, multi-pronged attack strategy that combines the fast-spreading capabilities of an e-mail virus like Melissa with a stream of attacking Internet traffic similar to Code Red. Several big-name companies, including Microsoft Corp., General Electric Corp. and Yahoo Inc., spent the past 24 hours beating back the worm and its fallout.

The outbreak of the virus, dubbed "NIMDA"--the word "admin" spelled backwards -- was disrupting Internet use in Asia and Europe on Wednesday. Internet security experts estimate that more than 130,000 Web servers and personal computers in the United States have been infected, and they expect the onslaught to continue.

Experts in the US say that damage caused by NIMDA is going to exceed the $ 2.6 billion in cleanup costs incurred after the Code Red outbreaks. Meanwhile Sophos has issued a warning against a possible outbreak of another virus called 'Vote A'. 


Lamenting about the cyber attacks, Anil Kumar Singh of Tips Computers, said that the situation is grim, from now on organizations will have to have a proper security policy in place as that is the only thing, which could save an enterprise from the havoc of a cyber attack. "Even browsing a Web page can trigger a virus onto your system, hackers are automatically changing the Web page coding of sites and in that process they are creating polymorphic viruses," he added.

"A virus identity file (IDE) which provides protection is available now from our website and will be incorporated into the November 2001 (3.51) release of Sophos Anti-Virus," informed, Dileep. At the time of writing Sophos has received just one report of this worm from the wild. Description: W32/Vote-A is an email aware worm. It arrives in an email with the subject line "Fwd:Peace BeTweeN AmeriCa And IsLaM ! The body of the email contains the text Hi iS iT A waR Against AmeriCa Or IsLaM !? Let's Vote To Live in Peace!

The worm will be attached as the file WTC.EXE. When the worm is run it will send itself to entries in the Outlook address book. It will drop and run a Visual Basic script in c:\windows\mixdalal.vbs. This script will search all drives (hard disks and network drives) for web pages with the HTM or HTML extension. The worm sets the browser homepage to us.f1.yahoofs.com, which will download a file called TimeUpdate.exe onto your computer. This file is a password stealing Trojan and is detected as Troj/Barrio The worm attempts to remove various anti virus products by deleting them from the directories.

These are just few of them to enlist, experts says situation can worsen. With an unprecedented amount of research started for an ever-new security threat, the Internet can be a battleground soon.

Zia Askari

CNS