An Item from fred langa

Unless you've been under a rock, you know about the new worm that
exploded around the world Monday afternoon. Almost all AV tools that use
"heuristics" were able to detect and block this worm before formal
definitions were released; and almost all the major AV vendors did have
definition updates available within hours of the worm's appearance,
anyway.

That, plus the fact that the worm relied on human help--- people had to
click on an unknown email attachment to launch the worm--- should have
meant that the worm went nowhere. Instead, it probably will end up as
the most-widely distributed worm of all time. (Sigh.) I've gotten
literally thousands of infected emails here, all of which were
harmlessly filtered and discarded.

I won't beat a dead horse--- or a live worm: You can read about the
worm, and how to recover from it if you're infected, at your favorite AV
vendor's site, such as this: http://langa.com/u/3h.htm .

But beyond stating the obvious--- use an up-to-date AV tool, and never,
ever, ever open any email attachment unless you know a priori that the
contents are safe--- there's one noteworthy twist to this worm: It was
apparently designed to take out SCO, as some kind of retaliation for
SCO's anti-Linux lawsuits.

Computers infected with the "MyDoom" virus will begin to
attempt to connect to the main page of the SCO company's
website on Feb. 1. The connection requests will come roughly
every second from each of the estimated thousands of machines
that are now infected, in an attempt to overload SCO's Web
server and knock the company's site off the Internet....
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,62058,00.html

I think SCO's suits are wrong, but this isn't the way to fight back. I
hope whoever wrote this virus is caught and sent away for a long, long
time. What a waste of time, bandwidth, and effort!