Mydoom: A lesson in FUD
Fear, uncertainty and doubt can have very real effects on security, especially when uninformed 'experts' are too quick to jump to conclusions. Mydoom was an example. In the last week of January 2004, a new worm was discovered squirming its way across the Internet.
Security researchers quickly realized this was the fastest-spreading e-mail worm yet, eclipsing even the promiscuous Sobig worm. Craig Schmugar of McAfee saw a line of code containing the text "mydom", and said of his decision to call it Mydoom: It was evident early on that this would be very big. I thought having "doom" in the name would be appropriate.
The original Mydoom worm carried two payloads:
- A distributed denial-of-service (DoS) time bomb, set to go off on the first of February that year
- A remote access backdoor that allowed an infected MS Windows computer to be controlled without its user's knowledge
