Another e-mail nasty virus has been spreading like wild fire around the internet within just 24 hours, clogging up networks and corporate mailing systems. Many experts are stating this recent virus could become the biggest yet.
“Mydoom” as it has been dubbed has already proven to rock many of the large e-mail systems on the web with experts having to shut down their systems in order to disinfect.
Some reports mention that as many as one in 9 e-mails have been infected to date.
Experts are claiming Mydoom is particularly aggressive in that is combines mass-mailing spam techniques with a viral code.
It seems to be spreading through peer-to-peer music download software such as Kazza and Windows-based mail servers.
Potentially the virus comes in disguised as an error message tempting user to open, though if infected the virus has the potential to open a communications port, leading a machine open to a hacker.
Security experts were warning that Mydoom, first detected late on Monday New York time, could generate up to 8m infected e-mails in the first 24 hours.
Craig Schmugar, virus research manager at the computer security firm Network Associates said hundreds of thousands of machines worldwide were believed to have been infected by midday yesterday,
Large corporations are prime breeding grounds for viruses because, once infected, their huge internal address books generate a massive volume of infected e-mails. Audiocourses has not had its address books infected, these are very well protected though many of our members may well have been hit through other avenues.
Mydoom does not tempt users with personalised messages. Instead, some messages are technical in nature in hopes of convincing people the e-mail is legitimate. The infected e-mails' subject lines vary, while the attachments have ".exe", ".scr", ".cmd", ".pif" or ".zip" extensions.
If you have received e-mails similar to anything we strongly recommend you update your virus definition database as soon as possible.
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Grisoft