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New, fast-spreading worm spells 'doom' for many

The Mydoom worm, which appeared yesterday, is spreading faster than last year's Sobig-F worm
 

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January 27, 2004 (IDG News Service) -- A new e-mail worm is spreading rapidly on the Internet, clogging e-mail servers and staging an attack on the Web site of Unix vendor The SCO Group Inc., antivirus software vendors said.

The worm surfaced yesterday and has been given several names by antivirus software vendors, including Mydoom, Novarg and Mimail.R (see story). Experts disagreed about the worm's payload but said 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 yesterday afternoon. Some businesses have shut down their e-mail gateways to block the worm, he said.

This worm has taken off fast, with well over 20,000 interceptions within just two hours of it being discovered, Ken Dunham, director of malicious code at Internet security company iDefense Inc., said in a statement via e-mail.

Massive spreading of the worm slowed down performance of the top 40 U.S. business Web sites yesterday afternoon, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based Web performance monitoring firm. The average time for a site to load exceeded four seconds, while they normally load in two to three seconds, Keynote said. This morning, response time had improved to 3.2 seconds, "on the high side of normal," Keynote said.

The worm arrives as an e-mail with an attachment that can have various names and extensions, including .exe, .scr, .zip or .pif. 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.

The sender's address can be spoofed, meaning that the message could appear to be from a colleague, friend or the e-mail system administrator.

"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.

Continued...
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Reprinted with permission from

For more news from IDG visit IDG.net
Story copyright 2006 International Data Group. All rights reserved.


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