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Beware!: Another worm virus clogs traffic on Web |
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E-mail servers overloaded, e-commerce disrupted
January 28, 2004
BY MIKE WENDLAND
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
Once again, the Internet has been sucker punched by a vicious worm virus that has overwhelmed corporate e-mail servers, slowed Web traffic by more than 50 percent and disrupted e-commerce all over the world.
This time -- depending on the variant that lands in your mailbox -- the perpetrator is called MyDoom, Novarg or Mimail.R.
It's ugly out there, said Ray Cavaliere of Michigan Computer Solutions, a Sterling Heights information technology company. Many of my corporate customers have been so inundated that they've thrown up their hands and basically shut down their e-mail servers until it slows.
No one knows when that will be.
The worm started spreading late Sunday and quickly became an epidemic, outpacing the Sobig.F virus, which caused rampant infections last summer and had been the fastest-moving worm the Net had seen.
By 3 p.m. Tuesday, security experts estimated that 300,000 machines were infected and that as much as 15 percent of all e-mails on the Net contained the worm. On my own computer Tuesday afternoon, I received 274 e-mails containing the worm in just under two hours.
But that pales to what Steve Colyer, who handles the e-mail server for Woodside Bible Church in Troy, had to contend with. From 11 a.m. through 5 p.m. Tuesday, he received 3,216 e-mails containing the worm.
All these messages are simply flooding the Net, Colyer said. They're coming in faster than we can delete them.
The FBI and U.S. Secret Service formed a task force to find out who was responsible. Early indications were that the worm originated in the United States.
Like other troublesome viruses, MyDoom arrives unsolicited as spam, mass-mailed from millions of infected computers running the Windows operating system that caught the virus after someone opened a file attached to a message. The worm, which is embedded within the attachment, then grabs e-mail addresses from the user computer's list of contacts and automatically sends itself out to everyone on the list.
Damage through business interruptions and productivity losses in just the first two days of the infestation is estimated by mi2g, a security group based in London, at $850 million -- and rising fast.
The Symantec antivirus firm said the worm appeared to contain a program that collects user names and passwords and then distributes them to strangers. Another company, however, Network Associates, said its initial inspection of the worm did not find that program.
One thing that this worm does differently from most of the previous ones is that it sends itself using a technique known as intelligent e-mail, which randomly changes the name of senders and subjects. That way, if one message looks suspicious, the next may not, and victims are more apt to open it.
Something else this worm does: It's programmed to launch a massive attack next week against the Web server of SCO Group, a company that's in the midst of a legal dispute with users of some versions of the Linux operating system. That dispute has angered many hackers, who often prefer to use Linux.
But because it attaches itself to infected computers and listens for commands that can activate it to launch other mass e-mailings, this virus epidemic could create a global army of soldiers who are at the command of the virus author, warns Central Command, an Ohio antivirus software maker.
Infected e-mail can have a variety of subject lines and body texts, but in many cases, it will appear to be an error report stating that the message body cannot be displayed and has instead been attached in a file, experts said.
The Internet is a vital part of the nation's economic future. We cannot afford disruptions like this. And if we aren't serious -- and serious soon -- about shoring up poor security and catching the cyberspace vandals, we're going to find it even worse when adults in terrorist groups figure that what the hackers can do, they can do better.
Contact MIKE WENDLAND at 313-222-8861 or mwendland@freepress.com.
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