By Ron Coates, 9 February 2004 16:25
NEWS Net experts are warning that the threat from MyDoom is not going to go away on its own.
"The only way to stop this extremely dangerous worm is to remove it from your PCs," warned Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds in a company circular.
And Jack Clarke of McAfee agrees. He said: "It's not going away on its own. We still have viruses from the 80s in circulation".
It is widely believed that MyDoom is designed to self-terminate on 12 February, but Reynolds said, "MyDoom has created an army of zombies; remote PCs that can be used to execute attackers' future commands".
"These attacks will [probably] continue after 12 February, and the threat will not end until the MyDoom executable has been removed from all infected PCs."
The day after 12 February will be Friday the 13th, always a popular time for virus release.
In terms of MyDoom, most of the hard work is over for McAfee, but Clarke says, "we can [only] wait for the next one. It will possibly be within days".
Clarke pointed out that 26 per cent of McAfee's 170,000 home users had been infected, and added that facilities to remove the worm were readily available on the net.
Comments
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1. Mr C. Sense
These boys are clever. I'm not a net expert so I would have just left it on my PC, had I been infected.
2. anonymous
McAffee is far from the best anti-virus company and software. Sophos is far better. And Grisoft is free for all users with free update. Mine has been protected with it for over a year and resisted all (new or old) virus attacks.
3. Simon Hobson
Direct action can help! I was getting between 10 and 30 copies of Klez every day to an address which I had posted to a mailing list with - when I looked, many of them originated at the same IP address.
I looked up the ISP owning the address and reported it to their abuse team, now I only get one or two a day.
We have had similar problems in the past with other virii, and found that frequently requests to an individual fell on deaf ears. Complaints to their ISP has always resulted in action.
I think many, many people just don't know they are infected, and many don't care either. So don't just sit there complaining about it, do something and complain to their ISP - the details are easy to find.
4. anonymous
I agree with the anonymous writer on McAfee, unfortunately it is not the best, I had it on my computer 3 years ago and it got infected badly by viruses and worms, to an extent some friends started accusing me of deliberately sending viruses to their systems..Now i am using Norton which is by far better so far..and has been protecting my system so far, in the past week, we have had around 6 MYDOOM attacks without success
5. anonymous
Our school computers have MyDoom on them and I thought it was some odd school program or something because my home computer doesn't have it.