A new Internet worm has emerged in China which is similar to the Code Red worm that caused $2.4 billion in estimated costs on Internet-linked computers last month, a computer security expert said today.
The Code Blue worm has similarities with the Code Red worm, said a worker at the police-run Computer Virus Treatment Center in Tianjin, about 100 kilometres from Beijing.
He said the virus was being analysed but that his office had no estimate of how many computers or servers had been infected with the new worm.
In the US, the first Code Red worm infected more than 250,000 systems in just nine hours on July 19th shortly after it was first reported, according to the National Infrastructure Protection Center at FBI headquarters.
In August a second version of the worm emerged. It affected computers and servers linked to the Internet running a version of Microsoft Corp software called Internet Information Server (IIS).
The Code Red II infected thousands of computers worldwide and prompted China's Ministry of Public Security to issue a public warning.
The worker at the centre in Tianjin said the Code Blue worm infects computers exploits a different weakness in the software from the Code Red viruses.