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Posted on 3-2-2004
Worm
Closes US Software Website
by Tania Branigan, February 2, 2004, The Guardian
MyDoom, one of the fastest-spreading internet worms ever produced, hit its
target yesterday and shut down the American software company SCO's website
by flooding it with millions of requests.
Security experts believe a row about software ownership may be behind the
attack on the SCO Group, which was unable to defend its website despite
knowing the attack was on its way.
SCO has made itself unpopular by claiming that its intellectual property
had been illegally included in Linux, an open source operating system,
which means that its source code is freely available to everyone. Many
programmers hate the idea of people trying to own it.
MyDoom generates as many as one in nine of all the messages being sent
globally. It may have affected more than a million PCs. It first appeared
on Monday and in most cases seems to a message delivery failure notice.
The worm is activated when the user opens an attached file. It forwards
itself not only to all the addresses in the email system but to any
address it finds on the computer's hard drive, such as those on websites
which have been cached. It also "spoofs" email addresses - pretending to
come from a different user - so that recipients cannot tell who is
infected. It then causes the infected computer to launch a "denial of
service" attack on SCO's website by requesting it every 50 milliseconds.
SCO admitted yesterday that its servers had been unable to cope. "The
companies which are usually attacked are either anti-virus, anti-spam or
Microsoft," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the
software security firm Sophos. "You have to ask why SCO have been targeted
and there's been controversy around them ... because of the debate about
who owns Linux. It's made a lot of people very angry."
Most writers on open source discussion sites condemned the virus writer
yesterday, and Bruce Perens, a leading open-source programmer, issued a
statement suggesting that spammers had launched the virus to smear the
open source community, which has created anti-spam technology. He pointed
out that spammers often used denial of service attacks to shut down
opponents' websites.
Microsoft is the target of a variant, MyDoom.B, which will begin denial of
service attacks tomorrow, but is unlikely to be as badly affected as SCO.
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