Mydoom email worm

[David]

Just started receiving mails with this new virus. Had about 10 already today so it's obviously agressive. See this BBC news article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3432639.stm) for details.

Pay special attention to any file attachments you receive, especially emails that use the word "Test" in the title or body.

Look at the Symantec Security Response page (http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.novarg.a@mm.html) if you think you may have the worm.

[francis]

Thanks to my paranoia, I think I'm safe: I only view mails as plain text (no HTML), JavaScript in mails is disabled, remote loading images are barred, I don't use Outlook/Express. Not had any of these, but in the last fortnight I've started getting swamped again by the Swen (http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.swen.a@mm.html) worm. Someone has got it (I'm inclined to believe it's not a mailing list as hundreds of people start screamming if it seems to be coming from one), and it's driving me up the wall. I thought this had died off, but obvisouly not. About 5 of the things a day for the last fortnight.

More on Mydoom from Wired.com (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,62058,00.html/wn_ascii)

[James]

I'm getting around 5 mails a day too - they are mainly claiming to be critical patches from Microsoft. I too had loads before Christmas, then they died off, but back this last few days. All have EXE attachments of about 106KB.

Makes you wonder how much data in transit around the world these worms account for. Must be very significant.

[francis]

Hmm, so you're getting them as well. As the stop/start pattern seems to be the same, it perhaps suggests that there's someone amongst the 11 of us who may be infected. It's not me - I did a full system scan last night :)

[David]

I've been using Norton Internet Security 2004 for about 6 months now. Best £40 I've spent in ages. As soon as I connected to the internet this morning, LiveUpdate kicked in and downloaded the latest virus definitions, including one for Mydoom. As soon as the worm started arriving (12 today), Norton Anti-Virus was deleting them. Excellent.

I've also been receiving alerts from strangers saying that I have sent them an email with a virus attached. Obviously this is not possible since Norton scans all outgoing mail but it does mean that Mydoom is finding my address in other peoples address books and sending out mail as if it had come from me.

Looks like this is going to be a big one. My mail server at VIA.NET was down for a while today (unheard of) so I assume they were having problems with it.

[Terry]

I had emails bouncing back from unkown addresses and emails from strangers (and some I know) about infected emails from my University address. I vary rarely send emails from that address and never open ones sent to that address using the University system. My University computer still somehow got infested!

Terry