Sasser.D Worm Arrives, Ready to Do Damage

A fourth version of the Sasser worm is now at work infecting Windows machines, and this one has the potential to cause serious network slowdowns and outages, experts say. The Sasser worm family, like its namesake, journeyman major league catcher Mackey Sasser, who once became so overcome by nerves that he couldn't throw the ball back to the pitcher and tried to reinvent himself as a first baseman/outfielder, is showing signs of changing its stripes in order to survive.

Sasser.D appeared Monday afternoon and is similar to the previous three versions in most respects. The main difference in the new variant is that it uses ICMP echo requests, also known as pings, to look for other machines to infect. The Nachi worm of last summer had the same capability and, on networks with a number of vulnerable machines, the worm caused severe congestion.

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