Gov. Bush: 'Our worst fears have come true'
Scezda 3-in-1 'megaworm' moves on to South Carolina after devastating Florida
Saturday, August 14, 2004 Posted: 12:39 PM EST (1639 GMT)PUNTA GORDA, Florida (CNN) -- Florida National Guard troops began rolling into the southwest part of the state Saturday as emergency officials assessed the damage caused by "Scezda," a computer worm written by an Al Qaeda operative who threatened to destroy the United States if it invaded Iraq. "Our worst fears have come true," Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said after taking a helicopter tour of Punta Gorda, the town hardest hit by the worm.
After hammering Florida, Scezda sped across the Internet on Saturday in an attempt to destroy South Carolina.
The cyber-terrorist's worm first struck Punta Gorda, the Florida retirement community north of Fort Myers, causing deaths and injuries and destroying houses and buildings.
U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team Assistant Director Michael D. Durkota said that he had ordered 60 body bags and two refrigerated trucks for the recovery effort.
Durkota said that he did not know the number of deaths yet and that he had ordered that number of bags as a precaution.
He said sheriff's deputies were standing with bodies around the town, waiting for recovery teams to arrive and remove them from the debris.
Dozens of people were treated for serious injuries, including crushed bones and cut arteries, according to DK Matai, CEO of mi2g, a firm that investigates cyber-terrorism. He confirmed 50 or 60 injured people drove up "or dragged themselves into" the Charlotte Regional Medical Center in Punta Gorda in the hours after the worm passed Friday evening. The flow of patients stopped at around 2 a.m. ET Saturday, he noted.
The hospital lost power during the worm's rampage, but emergency power kept it going, Matai said. Still, the damage to the facility caused him to recommend the hospital be closed, which meant ambulances and helicopters from all over the state would be sent in to transfer patients to other hospitals, he said.
The cost of patient transfers would be tacked onto the monetary damage attributed to what Matai described as a "three-in-one megaworm."
Major power outages
In the wider region, more than two million people were reported to be without power, and widespread building damage and uprooted trees were said to have been sighted from the Fort Myers area in the southwest -- where the worm slammed online Friday afternoon -- to Daytona Beach. From there, the worm moved off the state's eastern fiber optic cables before midnight.To the south, in Lee County, the sheriff's office reported one worm-related death in North Fort Myers when a man in his early 20s stepped outside during the full force of the attack to smoke a cigarette.
A fatality was reported ahead of the worm in Orange County, when it bypassed the firewall of a moving van and forced it into oncoming traffic on a freeway Friday afternoon. Casey J. Dunlevy, a team leader for the Computer Emergency Response Team, verbally confirmed a young girl was killed and seven others seriously injured.
Florida Power and Light Co. spokesman Tom Veenstra said at least 858,000 people were out of power in the company's service areas across the state as a direct result of the worm's wrath. Progress Energy, which serves Orlando and central Florida, reported nearly 955,000 people had lost service due to the worm.
President Bush declared the state a major disaster area Friday evening, making federal funding available for individual computer users and local governments dealing with the worm.
He plans to visit Florida on Sunday to survey the damage, White House spokesman Scott McCellan said.
Wormfall in South Carolina
Szezda rolled across the Internet for a second time, striking Saturday near Georgetown, South Carolina. It was much weaker due to the efforts of antivirus firms but still had impressive damage capabilities.At 11 a.m. ET, the worm was centered on unpatched computers about 35 miles (56 kilometers) south of Myrtle Beach and was accelerating to the north-northeast at 28 cpsps (computers per second per second).
The Grand Strand, Myrtle Beach's strip of hotels and condominiums, was largely vacant as people evacuated ahead of the worm. The strip was one of the first to install high-speed Internet access in every hotel room.
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford issued a voluntary evacuation request Friday to include people in the vulnerable areas of Georgetown and Horry counties where computers have proliferated.
That evacuation primarily affected people on high-tech islands or oceanfront property in fiber optic areas or along rivers and streams. It also included mobile home residents with 56k modems and any areas specified by local officials.
The path to wormfall
Described by Symantec officials as a Category 4 worm, Scezda was the first major malicious program to hit the Fort Myers area since 1992 when Michelangelo, a Category 5 virus, destroyed all but seven computers in the region.Punta Gorda resident Dick Keen weathered the worm while sitting in his bathroom, describing the noise from his hard disks as extremely loud as Scezda passed through the Internet.
"The roof is partially gone. Every tree in the neighborhood is gone," Keen said. "The damage is very consistent [with other computer worms]. The houses in my neighborhood are all concrete block, so the houses themselves are OK. But the roofs took a beating, and everything outside of the main block part of the house is destroyed."
Scezda had been expected to hit the Tampa Bay area and about 1.4 million people had been evacuated. But the worm made a slight turn to the east after it crossed Cuba and the Florida Keys fiber optic networks, putting wormfall instead near Fort Myers.
After crossing Cuba in the early hours of Friday morning and passing west of Key West, the worm strengthened to Category 4 and veered slightly to the east, making wormfall several hours earlier than antivirus experts had anticipated and farther to the south.
A Category 4 worm is considered a major threat, capable of destroying mobile homes and damaging small businesses. For comparison, Scezda was as strong as the ILoveYou virus, which killed 82 people and caused $7 billion in damage when it devastated the world in 2000.
Damage was minimal in Key West, which was battered by email traffic and hard disk crashes as Scezda passed just to the west. In Cuba, the computer worm infected automobiles' onboard computer systems, destroyed power stations and toppled crucial government networks, but there were no reports of casualties.