Mydoom possibly the fastest spreading virus ever

The first major virus of the year spread rapidly across the Internet for a second day on Tuesday [US time], clogging e-mail systems and slowing Internet traffic with an avalanche of bogus messages that may make the virus the fastest spreading ever.

The virus, dubbed 'Mydoom' and 'Novarg' by security experts, started its march in the US late Monday and appeared to be spreading even faster yesterday, infecting one out of every nine e-mails, antivirus software maker Central Command said.

Rival Network Associates Technology said the virus had surpassed last August's Sobig.F in the speed with which it travelled, and estimated the latest virus had infected between 100,000 and 300,000 computers. 'It's the fastest-spreading e-mail virus ever,' said Craig Schmugar, virus research manager for Network Associates. 'Sobig.F was out quite a while before it hit its peak numbers, whereas this virus right from the early stages of discovery reached very large volumes of e-mail.'

Postini, which cleanses e-mail before it reaches the networks of corporate clients, said it was intercepting 330,000 infected e-mails an hour. As of Monday [US time], company had quarantined more than 8 million messages.

By comparison, Postini intercepted 1,400 e-mails infected with Sobig.F on its first day, and 3.5 million the second, said Scott Petry, vice president of products and engineering at Postini.

The increased traffic from Mydoom hurt overall Internet performance, Keynote Systems said. The company said its tracking index showed that the Internet at noon Pacific time was 8 percent to 10 percent slower than normal for a Tuesday. Performance, however, was back to normal by 2:30 p.m.

The Mydoom attack appears aimed, in part, at setting up computers for a February 1 attack against the web server of the SCO Group.

The company has been the target of several attacks over the last 10 months, with the latest in December taking down the company's server for more than a day.

While not proven, SCO may have been targeted because of its legal challenge of the open-source operating system Linux, which the company claims contains its copyrighted code. SCO's lawsuits have angered the Linux community and its supporters.

Conversely, Linux enthusiasts say the virus may have been assembled for the purpose of defaming Linux developers.

On Tuesday, SCO offered a US$250,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the Mydoom virus author. 'The perpetrator of this virus is attacking SCO, but hurting many others at the same time,' Darl McBride, president and chief executive of SCO, said in a statement. 'We do not know the origins or reasons for this attack, although we have our suspicions. This is criminal activity and it must be stopped.'

SCO is working with the US Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation in investigating the virus.