Jan 28, 2004 : MyDoom Spreads as SCO Offers Bounty

📅 January 28, 2004 - The MyDoom virus that hit on Monday has been called the fastest spreading virus ever, surpassing year's Blaster and Sobig worms.

According to the mi2g Intelligence Unit (mi2g.net), a digital risk firm, MyDoom had become the ninth worst malware of all time less than 48 hours after it was first unleashed.
Central Command (centralcommand.com), a developer of anti-virus software, said that one out of every nine emails is being infected by the MyDoom virus.
mi2g now estimates that the MyDoom virus has caused nearly $3 billion of economic damage worldwide in terms of loss of business, bandwidth clogging, productivity erosion, management time reallocation and cost of recovery.
The MyDoom virus, also known as W32.Novarg.A@mm or WORM_MIMAIL.R, disguises itself as a returned email and contains an executable attachment that is meant to look like a text-file attachment. It appears in inboxes masqueraded as a returned email.
According to research and analysis firm Netcraft (news.netcraft.com), sites infected by the virus will attempt to launch a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on the sco.com (sco.com) Web site on Feb. 1, 2004.
Yeseterday, Netcraft reported that the sco.com Web site was again offline after being down temporarily when the virus first began spreading. SCO said in a statement that it has been the victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, but as Netcraft reported, the DDoS attack on the sco.com Web site is not set to launch until February 1.
In response, The SCO Group, who is currently embroiled in several legal battles with Linux vendors over UNIX licensing copyrights, announced that it was offering a $250,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the writer of the MyDoom virus.
"This is criminal activity and it must be stopped," Darl McBride, president and CEO of SCO, said in a statement. "To this end, SCO is offering a total of $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for this crime."
SCO, which is working with the US Secret Service and FBI to investigate the source of the virus, has been the victim of a string of DDoS attacks in the last several months.
Internet measurement authority Keynote Systems (keynote.com) reported that overall Internet performance was 8-10 percent slower than usual on Tuesday. Keynote said the slowdown was not significant and may not even be detectable by the typical Internet user. However, the company did warn that overall Internet performance may be adversely affected on February 1, when the DDoS attack against sco.com is launched on Super Bowl Sunday.
the mi2g Intelligence Unit said the global economic damage caused by hacker attacks, spam, phishing scams, denial of service attacks and malware proliferation is estimated to be between $8.3 billion and $10.2 billion so far in 2004.
Wednesday morning, the mi2g Intelligence Unit reported that a variant of the MyDoom virus has emerged.
The variant, MyDoom.b, reportedly has a larger payload than the original and targets the Microsoft.com Web site for a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Sunday, February 1, the same day the MyDoom.a virus is set to target SCO.
Mi2g said that the new variant also includes minor changes to the text padding.
"This is an extremely unwelcome development. MyDoom.b may have just multiplied the full impact of MyDoom.a a few fold," said DK Matai, Executive Chairman, mi2g. "We know that many large and small organisations as well as homes are struggling to cope with the deluge of emails originating from the A variant infections never mind the arrival of B, which shows signs of being just as vicious."