John P. Stenbit, assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications and intelligence, said Code Red denial-of-service attacks against DoD computer systems appear to have been mitigated for now.

"But, it has had its effect. There is no question about that," he remarked.

DoD’s preventive efforts against threats presented by viruses such as Code Red are centered in Washington and at U.S. Space Command in Colorado, which has computer system defense as one of its missions. Stenbit said DoD has bolstered its anti-information warfare efforts in recent years.

"The comparison with how the Pentagon deals with that kind of problem today compared with three or four years ago is enormously more positive," he said. "That’s a good thing, because it is enormously more dangerous these days."

The Code Red virus first attacked July 19 and infected more than 250,000 systems in just nine hours. Known as a "worm," Code Red scans the Internet for vulnerable systems and attempts to infect them. DoD officials identifed the July 19 attack and directed publicly-accessible military Web sites to cut their connections to the public. Defense computer network administrators also began installing special "patches," to keep the virus from spreading. The network went back on line July 24.

The virus, which began mutating, attacked again July 31, but DoD technicians had already patched the systems.