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A new worm that attacks Linux Web servers has compromised more than 3,500 machines, creating a rogue peer-to-peer network that has been used to attack other computers with a flood of data, security experts said Saturday.

The worm seems to spreading fairly rapidly, according to security firm Symantec, which early Friday detected about 2,000 infected computers actively attacking, a number that climbed to 3,500 late Friday. The company's security personnel could not be contacted for comment Saturday.

The worm targets Apache Web server installations on a variety of Linux systems, including those from Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake and Slackware. By exploiting a security hole in the Apache OpenSSL module that enables a widely used encrypted communications service known as the secure socket layer, the worm can copy itself to new servers.


More: CNET

edit: wrong section. please move.