A new type of computer virus, more lethal than the infamous Code Red worm that snarled Web servers around the world, has infected a number of Chinese computers, the official Xinhua news agency said Friday.
The virus, called Worm.IIS.CodeBlue, broke out on Wednesday and had paralyzed some computers by infecting the Windows 2000 system, Xinhua quoted sources with a Beijing-based anti-virus company as saying.
"Experts believe that this virus is more damaging than the previous Code Red II," Xinhua said.
Code Red was discovered in July and according to a US congressional report probably originated at a university in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.
The virus invades servers and overwhelms their memory capacity, shutting them down just before the worm is passed to another computer.
Servers are computers that pass data, such as Web pages and e-mail, across the Internet. Individual computers are not vulnerable to the attack.
Some versions of the Code Red virus targeted attacks on the White House Internet server, although officials said no damage was done to the site.
A California-based research group said more than one million servers were infected by the Code Red virus and that the economic loss from the infections was 2.6 billion dollars worldwide.
The Xinhua report did not say where the virus might have originated -- BEIJING (AFP)
