caused $850 million worth of business productivity losses, according to estimates by the mi2g Intelligence Unit (mi2g.net).
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The virus, which began spreading yesterday at about 9 pm. GMT. is also known as
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W32.Novarg.A@mm or WORM_MIMAIL.R. The virus disguises itself as a returned email and
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contains an executable attachment that is meant to look like a text-file attachment.
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“Although it is too early to say how much cumulative damage is likely, it would seem
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that MyDoom’s purpose is to carry out mass identity theft and clog networks,” said
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DK Matai, executive chairman of mi2g. “There is a distributed denial of service
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component targeting a specific vendor site as well.”
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The vendor site cited by Matai is the Web site of SCO, a software company
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currently embroiled in several legal battles with Linux vendors over UNIX licensing
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copyrights.
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According to research and analysis firm Netcraft (netcraft.com), sites infected by the virus will
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attempt to launch a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on the sco.com Web
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site on Feb. 1, 2004. Netcraft reported that after the virus began spreading
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yesterday, the sco.com Web site was down briefly.
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Web performance measurement, testing and management company Keynote Systems (keynote.com) conducted a Web site performance test
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on the top 40 business Web sites in the United States for the time period 8 am. EST
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to 6 pm. EST, coinciding with yesterday’s spread of the virus.
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According to Keynote’s results, performance for the top 40 sites slowed as average
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download speeds averaged over four seconds, higher than the typical two to three seconds.
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The latest major virus attack follows the Sobig and MS Blaster viruses that spread
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worldwide last year.
