Virus: Nimda has hit Sophia

The new virus called “Nimda” (“admin”, for administration) has hit Sophia. Yesterday, Wednesday September 19th, it paralysed the servers of the IUT in Sophia Antipolis. Other site, which servers are located in Canada, that has been attacked: the new website of the Data Base Forum, an association from Sophia Antipolis which gathers users of Databases. As the servers of this site have fallen under the attacks, the site has had to be closed for more than one day and it has been reopened yesterday night after the servers and the security of the software platform had been cleaned up.

Appeared in the beginning of the week (see the article "Beware : a new virus called Nimda"), this virus could be a variant of the “Red Code” which has destroyed the world of servers last month. Nimda is spreading very quickly in North America, Japan and Europe (particularly in France and Germany). The virus is like an untitled e-mail attached to the file “readme.exe”. It’s spreading when you click on this file, but it also infects Web pages with downloading programs which are roughly secured.