‘Mydoom’ e-mail virus spreading

Jennifer Knight

Friday, Jan. 30, 2004 | 11:17 a.m.

Like a nasty cold that hangs around for days, the "Mydoom" virus plaguing e-mail systems has become a pain in the gigabyte to Las Vegas Valley businesses and municipalities.

Just like a cold, the mass e-mail virus is spreading at a rapid rate and clogging up systems. The virus has found a new victim -- the Microsoft Corp., according to a new warning released Thursday by the company.

Systems operators at the Clark County School District, Las Vegas and private businesses throughout the valley began to notice e-mails labeled "system error" or "undeliverable" on Monday. Most of the messages were successfully blocked, but no one will know the true impact of the virus until Sunday.

"We typically receive 500 to 700 e-mails a day," said Dan Wray, director of technical resources for Clark County School District. "Yesterday, we blocked 10,000 virus-infected e-mails, so it's very prolific."

Anyone who opened e-mails this week posing as a computer error message and then downloaded a zip or pdf file could set off a chain reaction on Sunday. If the virus isn't removed from the system, it is set to attack the websites run by the Utah-based software company SCO Group Inc. and Microsoft Corp., computer experts said Thursday.

The virus becomes embedded in the computer e-mail system and will then activate Sunday by sending constant requests for downloads from www.sco.com and www.microsoft.com until Feb. 12. If enough requests for downloads are received, the computer servers that run those websites could crash.

"There are companies around the world in 122 different countries that say they are having problems with this," Blake Stowell, SCO's communications director, said. "Problems range from serious slowdowns in the computer's ability to computers becoming completely unusable."

It is believed that the engineers of the virus targeted the SCO Group because of its pending lawsuit against Linux, a free operating system that is using software developed by SCO as part of its program.

"We feel like if they're going to use our software, they should pay for it," Stowell said. "They see us as a threat to that freedom."

SCO is offering a $250,000 bounty leading to the arrest of the virus' creator, but there may be more than one since the most recent version of the virus has been updated to include Microsoft. Microsoft announced Thursday an additional $250,000 reward for help in catching the creator of the version that attacks its website.

It is now estimated that one out of every 12 e-mail users in the world is infected with the Mydoom virus, making this the most prolific computer bug yet, Stowell said.

The virus has hit the systems of most local public agencies, although most of those systems have sophisticated virus protectors in place that identify problems early on.

The county has experienced a significant increase in its e-mail volume but officials said they had it fixed by Monday, Samantha Charles, a Clark County spokeswoman, said.

Las Vegas has also had its share of problems with the virus, Joe Marcella, the city's director of information technology, said.

"We are blocking 500 e-mail messages per hour," Marcella said. "We've had no shut downs but what we are experiencing is when we go out of the network, the rest of the (Internet) is a lot slower."

Smaller business that don't have sophisticated firewalls or virus protectors can be particularly vulnerable, said Rob Mundo, a technology consultant with the Las Vegas-based Proactive System, which installs and repairs computers and operating systems for small and mid-sized businesses.

"Our phone was ringing off the hook Tuesday morning and most of the calls were virus-related," Mundo said. "Where I find the biggest problem is when people think they are protected but they haven't updated their (virus protection) software, so they are not."

Mundo said most of his clients were properly protected but was still busy making his rounds Thursday just to make sure.

Virus protection or not, Wray said the technology department plans to work on Sunday to see if any school district computers start responding to the virus.

"On Sunday, when students and teachers aren't here, we're going to block access to SCO's website and on Sunday night check to see how many blocked attempts we had," Wray said. "If it's not a huge number of computers attempting to get onto those websites, we'll go ahead and let it through."