Steve Gibson on ' Code Red ' ridiculed by skeptics at 'The Register'

Techno-hypemeister and headline glutton Steve Gibson has joined the Electronic Pearl Harbor dog and pony show alongside Ron Dick's NIPC, bellowing and trumpeting about lakes of fire to be ignited by the Code Red IIS worm which is due to return from dormancy this week. The worm went silent on the 28th, though a few machines with incorrectly set clocks will undoubtedly continue to scan, perpetuating the infection somewhat.

However, according to Gibson's hysterical reasoning, this represents nothing short of a catastrophe. Referring to a report by CAIDA (the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis), he borrows a few charts and graphs and technical-sounding phrases and runs us through the grease...

"Be sure to notice that the vertical axis of Figure 3 is LOGARITHMIC, so that nice straight and linear 'growth line' is actually exponential!" he warns us frantically.
He's saying that a handful of machines will manage to re-infect the entire Internet in short order.

So to break it down: during this current period of dormancy, remnants of the first worm, along with a second strain possessed of a more random IP generator, have been scanning for and infecting vulnerable machines, and will continue doing so until all the infected machines begin packeting the former IP of whitehouse.gov on 20 August.

This they will do mercilessly through the 27th; and during this electronic Tribulation the worm will devour enough bandwidth to bring all of Christendom to its knees.

Now get this: the real burn here, Gibson reckons, comes from the presumption of a single IIS machine, or a small handful of them, with incorrectly set clocks, which will re-ignite the whole thing after 31 August, keeping us at the mercy of badly-set clocks for all eternity.

"Note that at the start of NEXT MONTH it will only take ONE SINGLE MACHINE -- with an out-of-sync date whose infection threads have remained active in a mistaken belief that the date is < 20 -- to re-initiate an exponential growth starting at midnight of August 31st," Gibson writes. [hyperventilation original] .......continued...

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