Hi All. It seems the Code Red worm is on the loose again. Take Care…Don in creepy town

"Early reports of activity spanning the entire globe, including the United States, indicate that the worm has gone active and is presently spreading throughout the Internet," the FBI said in a statement issued Wednesday morning. "We are hopeful that the many precautions taken by the public, the government and private industry will have some effect on its ability to propagate."

The Code Red worm--named after a hypercaffeinated, cherry-flavored Mountain Dew drink popular with computer programmers--infected servers around the world last month and launched a massive denial-of-service attack against the White House's Web site.

The worm only infects computers running the Windows NT and Windows 2000 operating systems and Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) Web server software, meaning few home PCs are vulnerable to the attack. But the worm could disable some e-commerce sites or slow down the overall speed of the Internet by bombarding sites with data.

As originally reported by CNET News.com, the Code Red worm takes advantage of a hole in IIS. Code Red was thought to have infected as many as 359,000 systems within about six days during its original attack in July, making it one of the fastest-spreading worms ever.

While Microsoft quickly released a widely distributed patch for the IIS hole, it's unclear how many system administrators have downloaded and installed the fix. Microsoft has estimated that servers responsible for some 6 million Web pages have the vulnerability.