On July 19, 2001 a computer worm affecting Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) web server was unleashed on the Internet. It soon became known as Code Red. This worm exploited a vulnerability in the indexing software distributed with IIS and did several things:
- It defaced the affected web site to display:
- "HELLO! Welcome to http://www.worm.com! Hacked By Chinese" (The last phrase became a stock phrase)
- It tried to spread itself by looking for more IIS servers on the Internet.
- It waited 20-27 days after it was installed to launch denial of service attacks to the several fixed IP addresses. The IP address of the White House web server was among those.