Internet engineers in the Asia Pacific region remained vigilant on Monday after a weekend attack by a highly contagious computer worm severely disrupted global web traffic.
Technicians in hardest hit South Korea appeared confident they had prevented further damage from the ”Sapphire” or ”SQL Slammer” worm, which caused the country’s worst-ever telecommunications breakdown.
Most other Asian nations appeared to have escaped relatively unscathed.
A representative for India’s umbrella National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) said no major problems had been detected among its more than 1 000 software firm members.
But another Nasscom representative said the worm had affected the network of state-run internet provider and long-distance carrier Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL).
”The entire network of VSNL was choked over the last two days. All the web-hosted services were hit,” said Avinash Raghavan, manager of web services for Nasscom.
Tokyo’s Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Post and Telecommunication said there had been no major disruptions to servers in Japan.
The Internet Society of China took emergency measures on Saturday after the worm was detected, and had the situation under control by night-time, the China Daily reported on Monday.
While providing few details of the disruption of China’s online services, the paper said the impact was minimised because most people had not been at work.
One of Thailand’s leading Internet service providers (ISPs) said damage from the weekend attack was limited. ”The receiving and sending of mail both domestically and internationally were slowed. But our service has been back to normal since Sunday,” said a technical officer from Loxinfo.
The impact of the worm on Singapore’s computer networks was still being assessed Monday. Raja Azrina Raja Othman, a deputy director of Malaysia’s National ICT Security Emergency Response Centre which monitors computer security, said the impact of the worm there was felt mostly at Internet Data Centres and so called ”server farms”.
Mohamad Ishak, an engineer with communications provider TIME dotCom Bhd, added the problem was less serious than previous attacks by international hackers.
”Traffic flow was normal on Monday compared to the weekend … (but) the threat is still there. We are monitoring closely,” he said.
Police in Hong Kong appealed for help after an English-language newspaper reported the worm may have originated in the former British colony.
”Some people claimed the (worm) was from Hong Kong. We are pretty sure it originated in Asia, but we have to do more tracing and tracking to be sure whether it is actually from Hong Kong,” the South China Morning Post quoted computer security expert Roy Ko Wai-tak as saying.
Unlike a virus, a worm does not require a user to open an e-mail attachment or initiate any other type of command to infect the computer.
It carries a self-regenerating mechanism that enables it o
multiply quickly across the Web and triggers a huge volume of transmissions which overload computer systems.
By late Saturday, the worm had affected nearly 250 000 computers worldwide, said Vincent Gulloto, vice president of US-based MacAfee Avert Labs and leader of Network Associates’ Antivirus Response Team.
The weekend attack was similar to the ”Code Red” virus that affected 300 000 computers in July 2001. It was the largest attack on the Internet since the Nimda virus struck in September, 2001. – Sapa-AFP