By Tuesday morning, major corporations were shutting down e-mail servers to cope with a torrent of several hundred infected attachments in individual users' in-boxes.

According to computer security companies, the ultimate target of the virus is The SCO Group, the Utah-based company that has threatened Linux users with lawsuits. The virus takes remote control of computers, and is programmed to launch a denial-of-service attack on SCO servers starting on Feb. 1.

SCO already has been the target of several small attacks, sparking concern that the MyDoom virus was developed by a Linux community activist. "With the help of IBM and Intel, we were already prepared to sink SCO claims in court," said one source from the embedded Linux community. "This kind of vigilante action against [SCO chief executive] Darl McBride helps no one."

Infected e-mails arrive with headers such as "Test" or "Error in Sending " Transaction Failure," and contain an executable file with a message about an inability to translate Unicode. When users execute the file, a back door is created in the Windows operating systems (including 95, 98, XP, ME, NT, and 2000) which allows other programs to be installed, and for the client computer to serve as a denial-of service platform for an attack on the SCO Web server.

Central Command, a computer security services company based in Medina, Ohio, estimated Tuesday that the Internet worm was spreading globally and accounting for one out of every nine e-mail messages being infected.

By: DocMemory
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