Code Red worm

On July 19, 2001 a computer worm affecting Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) web server was unleashed on the Internet. It soon became known as Code Red. This worm exploited a vulnerability in the indexing software distributed with IIS and did several things:

• It defaced the affected web site to display:

  "HELLO! Welcome to http://www.worm.com! Hacked By Chinese!"

• It tried to spread itself by looking for more IIS servers on the Internet.
• It waited 20-27 days after it was installed to launch denial of service attacks to the several fixed IP addresses. The IP address of the White House web server was among those.

See also:

• Morris worm
• Melissa worm
• SQL slammer worm