'Nimda' appears quiet after 10-day 'sleep'

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By Deborah Radcliff

(IDG) -- In a bulletin issued at 3:16 p.m. Friday, Symantec's "security response" program indicated that little meaningful trouble was being made by the "Nimda" worm as it ended its 10-day dormant stage.

"Symantec has not seen any significant increase in activity due to the re-activation of the e-mailing routine after its initial 10 day sleep period," the statement read, in reference to w32.Nimda.A, although researchers had discovered a third vector to the worm. It had been set to propagate again through e-mail at 1:00 a.m. EDT Friday.

"We rechecked the code base to Nimda, and we found a code set that is supposed to respread Nimda through e-mail systems starting 10 days after machines were first infected," said Oliver Friedrichs, director of engineering at the Attack Registry and Intelligence Service. That service is sponsored by SecurityFocus, a business security firm in San Mateo, California.

Ten days after first infecting machines, the worm was expected to attempt to respread itself through readme.exe attachments, with the same payload as its original mail-based infection.

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The impact could have been significant, depending on how well the IT community cleaned systems and patched Microsoft Corp. Internet Information Server (IIS) and Outlook programs. The 10-day vector was anticipated as being likely less severe than Nimda was the first time because more systems have been patched against the vulnerabilities, Friedrichs said.

But because Nimda has spread itself to so many places on computers, networked systems may not have been cleaned enough to prevent widespread mailings of the virus. Therefore, Friedrichs had advised IT managers to do the following:

• Double-check their patches.
• Make sure their antivirus software blocks Nimda.
• Block executables files at the e-mail gateway.
• Alert users not to preview or open any attachments that say readme.exe.