Fast Spreading Mydoom Virus Surpasses Sobig.F
Posted on January 27, 2004
Mydoom has become the fastest spreading virus ever, with 1 in 12 emails now infected. MessageLabs, provider of email security services, reports it has intercepted more than 1.2 million copies of the new mass-mailer worm known as W32/Mydoom.A-mm and is seeing a peak infection rate of 1 in 12 emails. The worm was first intercepted by MessageLabs on January 26th, 2004 at 8:03 a.m. ET and as of 9:00 a.m. ET January 27th, MessageLabs had stopped more than 1.2 million copies of the virus. In comparison, MessageLabs stopped 1 million copies of Sobig.F within the first 24 hours and recorded a peak infection ratio of 1 in 17 email messages.
Update: PC Mag has more about the rapid spread of Mydoom here. The virus started out on the Kazaa file sharing network before it spread to mail servers and began spreading wildly in email messages.The worm could have a payload that delivers a denial of service attack.
