Ads by TechWords

See your link here
Receive the latest technology news and information.
Security
Computerworld Daily News (First Look and Wrap-Up)
Computerworld Blogs Newsletter
The Weekly Top 10
Cloud Computing
View all newsletters




Privacy Policy
 

Experts: Mydoom worm spreading faster than last year's Sobig-F

Security experts said the Mydoom is propagating quickly across the Internet

January 26, 2004 12:00 PM ET

IDG News Service - A new e-mail worm that first appeared on the Internet this afternoon is spreading rapidly, according to leading security companies.
The worm is being called several names by antivirus software vendors, including W32/Mydoom, Shimg, Novarg and Mimail.R. It is now being analyzed by the antivirus companies.
Experts differed on the worm's payload but said it is spreading faster than Sobig-F, the most widespread e-mail worm of 2003.
"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.
Massive spreading of the worm slowed down performance of the top 40 U.S. business Web sites Monday afternoon, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based Web performance monitoring company. The average time for a site to load exceeded four seconds, while they normally load in two to three seconds, Keynote said in a statement.
"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 message 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 for 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


Reprinted with permission from

IDG.net
Story copyright 2009 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

Jump to comments

Security

Additional Resources

Microsoft
Here are some of the key reasons why you would want to run Unified Access Gateway with DirectAccess.
Microsoft
Review how one energy firm tightened protection and simplified IT work using business-ready security solutions.
Sybase
In this white paper, IDC analyzes the role of next-generation mobile enterprise platforms as organizations seek a more strategic deployment of mobile solutions.

Learn the important issues you must consider before starting your next mobility initiative. Get your mobility white paper from IDC now, compliments of Sybase.

White Papers & Webcasts

Death to PST Files
Download Now  

Web 2.0, Social Media and the Dark Web - A Web Criminals Paradise?
In this discussion, learn about the challenges of protecting your users from the potentially unsafe content hidden in the "Dark Web".

eGuide: Enterprise Security
Smart Security Strategies for 2010. Read now!  

Disaster Recovery 2008: Reduced Costs and Improved Performance
How long can your Enterprise afford to be without your data? With an accelerated disaster recovery program, you never have to answer this...


IT Jobs