MyDoom a taste of viruses to come, says security analyst
E-mail viruses like MyDoom will be the weapon of choice for future corporate and political Web site attacks, with one worm able to threaten thousands of big sites at once, a top computer security official said on Tuesday.
Hundreds of thousands of computers have already been infected by the fast-spreading MyDoom worm, which has toppled the Web site of US SCO Group and now has software leader Microsoft in its crosshairs.
This effectiveness, especially in harnessing an army of computers to bombard target sites with a flood of data, means copycats will likely be used by hackers and activists, said the top anti-virus official at Finland's F-Secure, a firm that works with various law enforcement agencies on a number of cyber criminal investigations.
"You could use exactly the same technique, or even a little bit more advanced technique...to carry out your own agenda and take down the sites you want," F-Secure Anti-Virus research director Mikko Hypponen told Reuters in a telephone interview.
"This is a much larger attack network than anything we have seen before. With this kind of horsepower you could take down not just one site, you could take down thousands of sites -- big sites -- at the same time and keep them down for quite a while."
In the past three years, a series of increasingly sophisticated worm outbreaks have been used to get across a political message or blackmail businesses. Victims range from Caribbean gambling sites to Pakistani government ministries.
