New MyDoom revives call to catch culprit
A new variant of the MyDoom worm, described variously as MyDoom.Q or MyDoom.O, that uses Yahoo! People Search to find new email addresses has been discovered sparking fresh calls in the industry for information leading to the arrest of the worm's author.
Last week, a MyDoom variant pumped so many queries into Google that the search engine was unavailable or very slow for large periods of time. The same variant of MyDoom also succeeded in knocking a number of smaller search engines--including Altavista and Lycos--off the web completely.
At the time of writing, Yahoo People was functioning normally.
However, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at antivirus firm Sophos, said he is not surprised that another MyDoom variant has been released and expects future variants to continue harvesting e-mail addresses from search engines.
"You don't have to be psychic to predict the release of more worms trying to scoop up e-mail addresses from search engines. Unfortunately, we expect to see other worm authors trying similar tricks in the future," said Cluley.
Earlier this year, both Microsoft and SCO each offered a $250,000 reward to anyone providing information that helped catch MyDoom's author.
