M'sia Copes Well From 'Slammer' Chaos
30th January 2002 (Bernama)

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 30 (Bernama) -- The local Internet gateway suffered only momentary congestion due to the SQL Slammmer worm that caused chaos around the globe because of the close cooperation between National ICT Security and Emergency Response Centre (NISER), Jaring, Maxisnet and other Internet Service Providers and Internet Data Centres.

NISER's director Major Husin Jazri said that the country needs an institution like NISER to provide technical guidance and coordination in handling Internet crises like the Slammer, the Code Red and NIMDA work outbreaks.

"The few hundred servers that we suspect have been infected is a very small figure when compared to the total Internet traffic in the country. The situation may get worse if no action is taken," he said in a statement Thursday.

Husin said that developed countries such as the US, the United Kingdom and South Korea -- the world's most wired country -- have dedicated bodies funded by their goverments to combat cyber threats.

"Malaysia stands proud today as one of the few developing countries capable of managing cyber-terrorism and the chaos arising from it," he added.

He said that the Slammer worm does not contain any malicious code such as backdoor or Trojan programme and it will try to infect any Microsoft SQL server and Microsoft Desktop Engine 2000 in the Internet and will cause network degradation across the Internet and denial of service.

He advised system administrators to take the relevant steps to patch their system and refer to www.mycert.org.my for further information.

NISER, which is a government funded agency incubated under MIMOS Bhd, got wind of the worm at about 1pm on Saturday and immediately started work to analyse and dissect it in collaboration with other International Computer Emergency Response Centres (CERTs) before alerting the country's Internet Service Providers of the outbreak on Sunday.