CNN reported its own outage at the hands of a worm believed to be related to Zotob.A, which appeared over the weekend, exploiting the MS05-039 vulnerability in Windows 2000 that Microsoft disclosed a few days earlier.
CNN also reported that the television station ABC News and the New York Times were hit. Earlier reports from Illinois suggested that Caterpillar also fell victim. It was rumored that other Disney sites besides ABC News had been hit.
A rumor that T-Mobile was hit was dismissed by a company spokesperson who said he was sitting at a Windows 2000 computer at the company’s US headquarters and was not infected.
It appeared that the infections can from the latest variant of Zotob, which some antivirus vendors classified as Zotob.E, but others defined as yet another variant of the Rbot malware.
Symptoms of infection this time include a constantly rebooting PC. Windows 2000 users can protect themselves by downloading the patch from Microsoft’s Windows Update site.
