21 Sep 2001
Don't advertise your weakness - Sophos Anti-Virus calls for action
Sophos, a world leader in corporate anti-virus protection, is
urging all website administrators to plug the holes in their
systems in the wake of the Nimda virus.
Sophos has already received thousands of calls about the Nimda
virus, which spreads through email and via unsafe web servers.
Download requests for Sophos's free detection and disinfection
utility have been arriving at a rate of one per second. But just
removing the virus is not enough - the holes which allowed it to
get in need to be plugged too.
Any computer infected by Nimda will start attacking other
people's web servers, and the hostile packets it sends out are easy
to recognise. Because internet packets are labelled with a unique
number (the IP address) which indicates which computer they came
from, they can easily be traced back to identify vulnerable
networks.
"Beware if your website is infected!" says Graham Cluley, senior
technology consultant, Sophos Anti-Virus. "This is a blatant
advertisement to hackers that your server is weak - vulnerable not
just to Nimda but to a direct attack. Practise safe computing, and keep
your server security up to date."
Sophos researchers have developed a standalone utility which can
detect and disinfect the W32/Nimda-A virus.
About Sophos
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing complete security solutions that are simple to deploy, manage, and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, mobile and network security solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.