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 MyDoom marches on
August 6, 2004
Next time you cannot access your favorite web site, it would probably be another variant of legendary MyDoom virus to blame, a virus intended to clog and disrupt major Internet servers worldwide with its provoked Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. At least that's what happened this week, when Google, and later Yahoo People Search services were slowed down as a result of thousands of simultaneous web requests storming their servers.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at antivirus firm Sophos, said he is not surprised that another MyDoom variant has been released and expects future variants to continue harvesting email addresses from search engines.
"You don't have to be psychic to predict the release of more worms trying to scoop up email addresses from search engines. Unfortunately, we expect to see other worm authors trying similar tricks in the future," said Cluley.
Earlier, both Microsoft and SCO each offered a $250,000 reward to anyone providing information that helped catch the worm's author.
"Someone in the computer underground must know the person or people behind MyDoom. Those with knowledge which may help the investigation should come forward now and pass their information onto the authorities," said Cluley.
At the end of last month, DoubleClick suffered a major blow when a DDoS attack on Tuesday had knocked out its popular online ad-serving service and its own corporate Web site for several hours, as the company officially reported.
The DDoS attack targeted DoubleClick's DNS (domain name system) and interrupted its ability to serve online ads to its 900 customers from about 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.
DoubleClick's customers also suffered, their websites containing links to DoubleClick's hosted ads were loaded sluggishly, weren't loaded at all or were loaded incompletely. One DoubleClick customer said he had to remove DoubleClick ads in order to prevent problems for Web site visitors. "We've been running most of the day without DoubleClick ads, so we certainly lost revenue from this," said the technical manager of a media site.
As Lloyd Taylor, vice president of technology at Web monitoring vendor Keynote Systems Inc. said "The attack was against the infrastructure of a service provider, in this case DoubleClick, that is common to many sites. The performance of these sites was dramatically affected by something over which they had no control, and may not even have known about until their customers called in to complain."
In the case of DoubleClick, the DDoS attack against it did not necessarily knock out its customers' sites but caused slowdowns in the loading of Web pages, as DoubleClick's servers could not respond to requests for ads, customers said.
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