The fastest Computer virus?

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Published on January 30, 2024 4:10:27 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNanTnzX77U

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On the 28th of January a new variant was discovered and this had the additional capability of blocking access to computer security companies preventing updates to virus protection software. Incidentally it also stopped pop-up ads...so…silverlinings.

As it spread, MyDoom attempted to make slaves of the infected computers for use in denial of service attacks, basically forcing the computers to try to access a website so many times that the site shuts down. These attacks, when they came in February, were massive but apparently unsuccessful.


Even as the worm was spreading many experts believed that these attacks were a ruse to hide MyDoom’s true purpose: creating backdoors into infected computers for later use by cybercriminals.


By mid february with a lot of work already done to clear the virus and counter its spread both variants automatically shutdown and the infection ended. But those backdoors remained open unless closed by techies or virus protection software.


Dozens of Mydoom variants followed the initial two over the last two decades and currently Mydoom variants are believed to still account for as much as 1% as all the spam emails in the world. Though are a nuisance now they have been used to cause major damage: an attack in July 2004 took down Google for a day and a 2009 variant was used to successfully disrupt the White House and the South Korean government.




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