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Excerpts - NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- A disgruntled hacker with a personal grudge against Symantec, which provides anti-virus software to leading Fortune 500 companies, could be behind a new, crippling computer virus that's already hit a division of at least one big U.S. corporation on Thursday. If it spreads, technology experts warn the latest strains of the insidious RINBOT computer virus could hijack network systems of businesses worldwide. ~ snip ~ Cluley said this strain appears to be hitting MS SQL servers. It looks for networks that run the Microsoft Windows operating system, including Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98,...

<p>However, administrators and end users who aren't running Microsoft's SQL Server -- the worm's primary target -- have felt no need to defend themselves against the worm.</p> <p>Unfortunately, such complacency may turn out to be dangerous. Besides the full-blown SQL Server software, Microsoft also sells a stripped-down database engine called the Microsoft Desktop Environment (MSDE) which contains the same buggy code. MSDE is included not only in many Microsoft products but in quite a few third-party offerings (including medical imaging software used by hospitals to catalog MRI and CAT scans), though it's not always turned on by default.</p>

Microsoft's policy of relying on software patches to fix major security flaws was questioned Monday after a series of internal e-mails revealed that the software giant's own network wasn't immune from a worm that struck the Internet last weekend. The messages seen by CNET News.com portray a company struggling with a massive infection by the SQL Slammer worm, which inundated many corporate networks Saturday with steady streams of data that downed Internet connections and clogged bandwidth. "All apps and services are potentially affected and performance is sporadic at best," Mike Carlson, director of data center operations for Microsoft's Information...

<p>As corporate IT departments go about the business of cleaning up their networks, there are strong indications that the SQL Slammer worm that brought down portions of the Internet over the weekend is based on the work of an obscure Chinese cracking group.</p>

<p>Some Bank of America ATMs were still out Monday, primarily in the Southeast, a bank spokesman said. And analysts blamed a dip in South Korea's stock market on the worm taking down most Internet connections in the country over the weekend.</p>

Internet cafes, online shopping malls and other Web-related businesses will likely take legal action as a result of their losses incurred by the virus-like worm which shut down millions of Web-based businesses over the weekend, industry sources said yesterday. It is not yet clear how and when they will take the steps, but officials from the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) said they have received messages that the businesses will form an alliance for a lawsuit against the ministry and major Internet service providers. ``Meetings have been organized by senior officials to discuss and how to deal with...