Update: Mydoom worm spreading rapidly

IDG News Service - A new e-mail worm has appeared on the Internet and is spreading rapidly, according to leading security companies.
The worm, which surfaced late today, is being called several names by antivirus software vendors, including W32/Mydoom, Shimg, Novarg and Mimail.R, and is now being analyzed by the antivirus companies.
Experts don't all agree on the worm's payload, but they do agree that it's spreading faster than Sobig-F, the worm that topped the charts for the most widespread e-mail worm last year.
"It has been moving very quickly for the past three hours and has been generating a hell of a lot of e-mail," Vincent Gullotto, vice president of the Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team at Network Associates Inc., said this afternoon. Some businesses have shut down their e-mail gateways to block the worm, he said.
"This worm is taking off like a rocket, with well over 20,000 interceptions in just two hours of it being discovered," Ken Dunham, director of malicious code at iDefense Inc. in Reston, Va., said in a statement.
The worm arrives as an e-mail with an attachment that can have various names and extensions. The e-mail can have a variety of subject lines and body texts, but in many cases it will appear to be an error report stating that the message body can't be displayed and has instead been attached in a file, experts said.
"This is something you might see from a mail system, so you click on the attachment," said Sharon Ruckman, senior director of Symantec Corp. Security Response.
Both Network Associates and Symantec agree that when the attached file is executed, the worm scans the system for e-mail addresses and starts forwarding itself to those addresses. If the victim has a copy of the Kazaa file-sharing application installed, it will also drop several files in the shared files folder in an attempt to spread that way.
Symantec also identified more malicious acts. The worm will install a "key logger" that can capture anything that is entered, including passwords and credit card numbers, Ruckman said. Furthermore, the worm will start sending requests for data to www.sco.com, the Web site of The SCO Group Inc., which could result in the Web site going down if enough requests are sent, she said.
SCO has noticed that its Web site performance has intermittently slowed, but it is too early to say if there is an attack on the site, said SCO spokesman Blake Stowell. "It may be showing the early stages of a DOS attack," he said.
SCO

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