Viruses, whether virtual or real, have impacted our lives. If the virus is well known, more likely it caused a lot of damage and grief to people around the world. Virtual viruses, like worms and trojans, have been known to corrupt or steal sensitive information from one’s computer. Here is one of the most well known computer viruses in the last century:
MyDoom (2004)
MyDoom muscled its way into the malware world in 2004, quickly infecting some one million computers and launching a massive distributed denial of service attack, which overwhelms a target by flooding it with information from multiple systems. The virus spread through email as what appeared to be a bounced message. When the unsuspecting victim opened the email, the malicious code downloaded itself and then pilfered the new victim’s Outlook address book. From there, it spread to the victim’s friends, family and colleagues. MyDoom spread faster than any worm seen prior.
The MyDoom (or Novarg) virus is another worm that can create a backdoor in the victim computer’s operating system. The original MyDoom virus — there have been several variants — had two triggers. One trigger caused the virus to begin a denial of service (DoS) attack starting Feb. 1, 2004. The second trigger commanded the virus to stop distributing itself on Feb. 12, 2004. Even after the virus stopped spreading, the backdoors created during the initial infections remained active.
MyDoom spread through e-mail and peer-to-peer networks. According to the security firm MessageLabs, one in every 12 e-mail messages carried the virus at one time. MyDoom could spoof e-mails so that it became very difficult to track the source of the infection.
Much like some of the other viruses, the MyDoom virus has spread and duplicated itself through e-mails. This virus can easily infect millions of computers in just a mere matter of minutes. Truly, this virus spells doom to anyone infected with this virus.
