My Doom Virus is Net’s Worst, Hits Critical Peak

The MyDoom email virus (or worm) has supassed SoBig in becoming the largest and most destructive computer virus in history. Millions of corporate and personal email systems were swamped yesterday by the MyDoom virus, also known as Norvag or Mimail-R.

According to a release by the US security firm MX Logic, the company was detecting more than 1,200 e-mails per second infected with MyDoom. With one out of every nine emails worldwide infected, it declared MyDoom a “critical threat”.

>MyDoom originated from Russia on Monday and by Tuesday afternoon it had already spread to 168 countries. According to some security industry estimates, more than eight million copies of the virus will be passed on today, when it is expected to hit its peak. MessageLabs, an email filtering company, picked up 1.2 million copies in the first 24 hours, some 200,000 more than the Sobig.F virus.

The MyDoom virus is apparently targets the firm SCO, an IT firm which reportedly has been in arguments with the open source community, Unix and Linux for some time now, with the main payload of its attacks. SCO has offered a reward of $250,000 for anyone that knows of the creators of MyDoom. The FBI has also launched an investigation into the origin of the MyDoom virus.

MyDoom comes via an e-mail message with an attached file. Like the other recent virus epidemics, social engineering techniques cheat the user making the think they are supposed to open the file. The virus not only infects the computer that received the e-mail but then mails itself to all the contacts found in addresses book. Early infections were also traced to the KaZaa file sharing network. Once the virus has infected the computer, it then searches for the peer-to-peer file sharing Network KaZaa. If KaZaa is detected a file is copied to the shared folder allowing its distribution via this peer to peer system.

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