Mydoom now worth $500,000
Here’s a worm that turned …
…into a cool $500,000.
That’s what MyDoom is worth now Microsoft has offered another $250,000 to add to the $250,000 bounty already put up by SCO for the head of whoever authored the e-microbe, which targets SCO and Microsoft in its A and B variations.
Now the fastest spreading email e-worm in history, it has the commercial sector scrambling to protect itself before tomorrow when it’s programmed to ‘officially’ launch its worldwide denial-of-service attack from every infected computer.
Mydoom has been nicknamed ScoBig, a play on Sobig.F which burrowed relentlessly through the Net last August.
Mydoom.B was at first thought to be more dangerous than the A version. But Finland’s F-Secure says, "It’s in the wild, but it’s not spreading nearly as high as everybody expected."
Ominously, however, "It’s quite likely that we will have a new version soon, there is nothing holding the creator back, especially since the B version did not turn out to be that successful," F-Secure’s Mikko Hyppoenen says.
Mydoom may not be as virulent as predicted, but there are now fears that the attacks may be smoke-screens to take attention away from the fact that the bugs open backdoors in infected computers so Mydoom’s author can later remotely enter the machines at will.
F-Secure first warned about the Mydoom worm on January 26th and issued its Radar Level 2 Alert. The warning was raised to Radar 1, its highest level, only 110 minutes after the first Mydoom sample was received.
Current estimates show that between 20% and 30% of all email traffic worldwide is generated by the worm, says F-Secure.
