Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Worm Attack on ABC, CNN, NYT, FT

The Financial Times reports that

An internet virus targeting computers running Windows 2000 software struck companies across the US and Europe, including several top media outlets. Joe Hartmann, director of anti-virus research at Trend Micro, said the Zotob virus had hit several large news organisations including CNN, ABC News, the New York Times and the Financial Times.

The virus - known as Zotob - tries to target every computer on infected networks, causing computers to shut down and reboot repeatedly preventing a user from logging on. Security experts said the virus had overloaded networks at several large corporations as of late Tuesday.



It's probably no coincidence that the organizations hit by the worm are precisely the ones that have been most consistently informative and honest about what is taking in place in Russia - this is especially true of ABC, which recently broadcast Andrei Babitsky's interview with Chechen leader Shamil Basayev. Other, non-media, corporations and companies were also affected, but the focus of the attack seems to have been ABC.

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