MyDoom Email Virus Spreading Rapidly

• By theWHIR.com , January 27, 2004

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caused $850 million worth of business productivity losses, according to estimates by the mi2g Intelligence Unit (mi2g.net).

The virus, which began spreading yesterday at about 9 pm. GMT. is also known as

W32.Novarg.A@mm or WORM_MIMAIL.R. The virus disguises itself as a returned email and

contains an executable attachment that is meant to look like a text-file attachment.

"Although it is too early to say how much cumulative damage is likely, it would seem

that MyDoom's purpose is to carry out mass identity theft and clog networks," said

DK Matai, executive chairman of mi2g. "There is a distributed denial of service

component targeting a specific vendor site as well."

The vendor site cited by Matai is the Web site of SCO, a software company

currently embroiled in several legal battles with Linux vendors over UNIX licensing

copyrights.

According to research and analysis firm Netcraft (netcraft.com), sites infected by the virus will

attempt to launch a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on the sco.com Web

site on Feb. 1, 2004. Netcraft reported that after the virus began spreading

yesterday, the sco.com Web site was down briefly.

Web performance measurement, testing and management company Keynote Systems (keynote.com) conducted a Web site performance test

on the top 40 business Web sites in the United States for the time period 8 am. EST

to 6 pm. EST, coinciding with yesterday's spread of the virus.

According to Keynote's results, performance for the top 40 sites slowed as average

download speeds averaged over four seconds, higher than the typical two to three seconds.

The latest major virus attack follows the Sobig and MS Blaster viruses that spread

worldwide last year.

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