Cali Valdivieso
2 April 2025
CYSE 200T
An attack on availability is anything that aims to disrupt or stop access to resources. Berghel (2001) writes about The Code Red Worm that “infected more than 250,000 systems in just nine hours (p. 15). The worm would infect at such a fast rate, that by the time engineers got a hold of it, and new for of Code Red 2.0 would have been delivered. Berghel (2001) describe how “the worm scans the Internet, identifies vulnerable systems, and infects these systems by installing itself” (p. 15). This worm is considered to be an active worm since it exploited ” security weaknesses in networking and operating system software to aggressively gain entry into computer systems”(Berghel, 2001, P. 16). This denial of service (D-o-s) would eventually attack the Whitehouse.gov website, leaving it compromised. The worm instead of attacking though a disk inserted in the computer, was spread throughout the internet. The worm unlike others when attacking a new server would do so through the same path as the previous one. This being a fatal flaw since typically worms when moving to a new software will use a path not used before so that it can not be traced back to the creator. The Code Red worm did not do the same and, left the possibility to a log being kept of all software infected as well as the order it was done. This worm was estimated to compromise over 750,00 servers and cause damage of 2.6 billion dollar (Fosnock, 2005). This leading to software security to be a growing need for all devices.
References:
Berghel, H. (2001). The code red worm. Communications of the ACM, 44(12), 15-19.
Fosnock, C. (2005). Computer worms: past, present, and future. East Carolina University, 8(2005), 1-9.