According to reports, over 3,500 servers have already been infected and are being used to attack other systems. Security firm Symantec said in an advisory released on Saturday: “It is confirmed through various sources that [the] worm is in the wild and actively attacking other servers.“
It appears that the worm, which has been dubbed linux.slapper.worm, exploits a security vulnerability in the Apatche OpenSSL module to target Linux systems, including versions of RedHat, Slackware, Debian, SuSE, and Mandrake, and copies itself to other servers. Symantec has rated the potential danger as “high”. Personal computers running Windows are not affected.