There's a new virus doing the rounds, and W32/Mydoom - as it's known - is spreading rapidly, according to the virus watchers. David Perry of Trend Micro tells Reuters: "Mailboxes at large corporations are infected and reporting multiple infections throughout their entire organisations."
The worm is programmed to unleash a large denial of service attack against US software firm Sco. The company has infuriated Linux advocates by launching a multi-billion pound lawsuit against IBM, and the broader Linux community, claiming IBM illegally donated Sco's code to the Linux system.
The worm hides in an techy-looking email that claims the message body is in an attachment. Open that attachment and... well, you know the rest. But plenty of people appear to be launching the attachments. Messagelabs said in a statement this morning that they had intercepted 1.2 million copies of the virus since yesterday lunchtime, when they spotted the first infected email coming out of Russia. They add: "Mydoom is a mass-mailing worm that attempts to spread via email and by copying itself to any available shared directories used by Kazaa.
"The worm harvests addresses from infected machines and targets files with the following extensions: .wab, .adb, .tbb, .dbx, .asp, .php, .sht, .htm, .txt. Mydoom also tries to randomly generate or guess likely email addresses to send itself to. In addition, initial analysis suggests that Mydoom opens a connection on TCP port 3127, an indication of a remote access component."
