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MyDoom Attack On Microsoft Falters

Microsoft dodged the denial-of-service bullet fired by the Mydoom.b worm Tuesday, due in equal parts, said an analyst, to a hacker's clumsy programming and the slow spread of the variant.

Unlike The SCO Group's Web site -- which was brought down by the original Mydoom worm, dubbed Mydoom.a -- Microsoft's site remains up and running. SCO removed its original site from the Internet's global directory over the weekend, and has offered up a new URL -- www.thescogroup.com -- as a replacement.

One web monitoring firm noted that Microsoft's primary site of www.microsoft.com, which was the second denial-of-service (DoS) target of the Mydoom.b worm, was actually performing better Tuesday than the day before. (Mydoom.b was coded to initiate its DoS attack on Microsoft.com as of 8:19 a.m. (EST) Tuesday.)

While Microsoft.com is experiencing some degradation in performance today -- 10 to 20 percent slower compared to the last two Tuesdays -- it's performing significantly better than yesterday, according to Ken Godskind, vice president with AlertSite, when many users may have been accessing the site to retrieve a newly-posted update to Internet Explorer.

At 1 p.m. (EST) Tuesday, for example, Microsoft.com's performance was up 25 percent over Monday's, said Godskind.

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