AVeS warns of CodeRed variant

A new variant of the original CodeRed II worm has been found in the wild. According to Symantec Security Response and AVeS Cyber Security, the new CodeRed.F minor variant differs in only two bytes.

CodeRed started spreading in the wild about two years ago, by exploiting known IIS server vulnerabilities. Despite the availability of security patches for almost two years, the new CodeRed.F is still able to use these old vulnerabilities to spread through IIS servers.

The worm has been escalated to level three by Symantec, because of the number of infections reported. The original CodeRed had a payload that caused a denial of service attack on the White House Web server. CodeRed II has a different payload that allows the hacker to have full remote access to the Web server.

New virus definitions are not required and available removal tools will still work on this latest worm.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) attempted to steal a march from Intel`s Banias launch on Wednesday by announcing the mobile Athlon XP. In all, AMD launched 12 new processors under the "Athlon XP-M" brand name. The new chips will extend AMD`s reach into both the thin-and-light and full-size notebooks segment, which the company has served with the aged mobile Athlon and Duron.

AMD introduced the low-voltage mobile AMD Athlon XP-M processors in 1800+, 1700+, 1600+, 1500+ and 1400+ speed grades, using micro PGA packaging for the thin-and-light notebook market. The company also introduced 2600+, 2500+, 2400+, 2200+ and 2000+ flavours to meet the high-performance needs of business and home users.

AMD`s new processors are priced from $71 to $147. New mobile processors for full-size notebook PCs are priced from $87 to $246, all in 1 000-unit lots. [www.extremetech.com]

Today at CeBIT 2003, Microsoft announced the beta release of the Multilingual User Interface & Recogniser Pack (MUIRP) for the Tablet PC. The MUIRP allows users or administrators to switch the user interface settings (eg, menus, dialogue boxes and help files) among multiple languages and allows installation of multiple handwriting recognition languages on the same Tablet PC.

The MUIRP extends user interface language support for the Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system -- originally released in English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese -- to several new languages, including Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Swedish. The MUIRP also allows the installation of a Spanish handwriting recogniser, enabling users to automatically translate notes that were handwritten in Spanish into text.

The Tablet PC Edition MUIRP is scheduled to be available in July. [PR Newswire]

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