[ISN] 80,000 Microsoft IIS servers "disappear" from the Internet

From: InfoSec News (isnat_private)
Date: Thu Oct 04 2001 - 01:04:00 PDT

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    http://www.vnunet.com/News/1125766
    
    By James Middleton
    vnunet.com 
    [02-10-2001]
    
    The impact of Code Red and related viruses such as Nimda has caused
    over 150,000 IIS-based websites on around 80,000 different machines to
    disappear from the internet. It has also resulted in the closure of
    one of the most visible proponents of Microsoft technology for mass
    hosting.
    
    According to the most recent Netcraft web server report, released this
    week, a significant number of sites running IIS fell off the web
    during the Code Red crisis.
    
    The number of IIS servers hooked up to the internet went down even
    more when Webjump, an IIS-based virtual hosting service, went under.
    At the time it died, Webjump hosted around 280,000 sites.
    
    Microsoft suffered a further blow on the back of this when analyst
    Gartner Group issued a strongly worded advisory recommending IIS users
    to evaluate alternative products.
    
    Only around 2000 of the 80,000 IP addresses running IIS that
    disappeared turned up running a competing web server, indicating that
    users have yet to react to Gartner's advice.
    
    Despite evidence to suggest that administrators have been securing
    their servers throughout a period of heightened worm activity,
    Netcraft's research "shows that numbers of vulnerable Microsoft IIS
    sites are actually starting to rise again, after the initial shock and
    disruption of Code Red prompted many sites to patch for the first
    time", said the company.
    
    Of those high profile sites seen to switch from Microsoft platforms to
    Linux, the most noticeable are search engine Infoseek, and the FBI,
    which is pushing the secure Linux bandwagon anyway.
    
    But the report did show that Microsoft still owns almost 50 per cent
    of the web server market, while Linux is in second place with almost
    30 per cent. Next is Solaris and BSD with seven per cent and six per
    cent respectively.
    
    "The trend is of Linux steadily increasing, Windows maintaining a
    large share, and the others slowly losing share," said Netcraft.
    
    But while Microsoft may have the lion's share on a per machine basis,
    on a per site basis Apache is king. Because a great majority of the
    world's websites are located at hosting and co-location companies, and
    technically sophisticated hosting companies can run several thousand
    websites on a single computer, the result is more sites running
    Apache.
    
    On this level, Apache holds 60 per cent of the market, while Microsoft
    only manages to hang on to 30 per cent.
    
    Netcraft's September 2001 survey was based on data gathered from
    32,398,046 websites and can be seen here.
    
    [http://www.netcraft.com/survey/ ]
    
    
    
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