MyDoom's day passes quickly
The latest variant of the MyDoom worm, which was discovered Monday, peaked after around 12 hours and has already started dying out, according to antivirus companies.
The new generation, known as both MyDoom.M and MyDoom.O, slammed four popular search engines Monday and clogged e-mail accounts around the world. Google, Yahoo, AltaVista and Lycos all slowed to a crawl, because once the worm infects a PC, it automatically performs Web searches on those search engines.
Natasha Staley, an information security analyst at MessageLabs, said the company intercepted just 599,641 messages containing MyDoom in its first 24 hours. This is less than half the number of infected messages caught during the 24 hours of the original MyDoom attack and is likely to keep falling as the week continues.
"MyDoom slowed down overnight and picked up again this morning, but more than likely it is a case of people's bedtime patterns. I don't expect to be here tomorrow saying there has been another 600,000 interceptions. It will probably tail off slightly tomorrow and there will be more significant drops throughout the week," Stanley said.
Security experts have been warning about the consequences of another MyDoom outbreak after the original version caused massive disruption to the Internet and launched a distributed denial-of-service attack on the SCO Group that knocked the company's Web site offline for more than a month.
