Folks I might just be paranoid..
I hope I'm totally wrong on this one..
Perhaps I'm reading between the lines too much..
I was not one of those doom sayers with the W2K scare, but I'm truly getting that funny feeling in the pit of my stomach on this one.
Perhaps it's because I have not found enough details on the internet to help me feel warm and fuzzy that any of the big boys have solid plans to deal with this latest threat.
This thing with the MyDoom virus is looking more and more like it is going to be big, big, big.
The MyDoom virus was first discovered on Monday afternoon, Jan, 26 2004
Latest reports indicate that the engineers are still trying to determine everything the virus is capable of doing.
Parts of the virus are encrypted slowing the process of reverse engineering the virus.
Things that engineers do all seem to agree on is that SCO is a target for attack and the attack will take place February 1, 2004.
It is being reported that Microsoft has and is seeing attacks from this virus directed at their Windows Update Site which appears to be already resulting in problems with the downloading of their Windows update patches.
In an article on ZDnet I read earlier.
An interview with Vincent Gullotto, vice president of security software maker Network Associates (McAffee) was reported to have said..
"In one hour, Network Associates itself received 19,500 e-mails bearing the virus from 3,400 unique Internet addresses, Gullotto said. One large telecommunications company has already shut down its e-mail gateway to stop the virus."
He was also reported to have said "It's Huge"
With that in mind and bits and pieces of other articles I found talking about the MyDoom threat...
My guess is that when this virus does start it's attack on SCO, the internet as a whole will slow down due to overloaded routers.
Some destinations not even related to SCO may experience problems simply because they share some of the same routes as SCO.
It's totally impossible to predict where all the infected computers are that will join this attack, It is quite possible that large concentrations of infected computers could bring down entire ISP (Internet Service Provider) networks due to traffic overload and bottlenecks.
If this should occur,
Places such as eBay, Yahoo, Amazon and virtually any other place on the internet you could think of may be inaccessible or be very slow when accessed.
Email transmissions could experience long delays and possibly not send at all.
Potentially this could result in an overload of our SMTP transmission server due to thousands of emails held in the queue retrying delivery to their destinations on the internet.
Once again let's hope I'm wrong..
There will be nothing anyone can do except wait for the big boys on these problem networks to sort it out.
You can bet that any trouble spots on the internet will have every available person running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to react to the overloads and doing everything they can to get things under control.
Again I hope I'm wrong...
PS.1 out of every 9 mails are suspect to carry MyDoom.
