The virus, however, was expected to taper off over the next 24 hours, Huger said.
"Mydoom" arrives in a zip file carried in an e-mail with the subject lines "test," "mail delivery system," or "mail transaction failed." The body of the e-mail tries to trick the receiver into thinking that the actual message is in the attachment. The message contains such statements as "The message contain Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment."
Once opened, the worm installs a program in the infected PC and opens a "backdoor" that enables a hacker to take control of the computer, apparently in preparation to flood the SCO server with information Feb. 1, security experts said. The kill date for the worm is Feb. 12.
The virus, which affects computers running Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP, scours the infected computer's hard drive for e-mail addresses to send copies of itself. Mydoom also copies itself to the download directory on PCs for the file-sharing service Kazaa.
Symantec's Huger said the company had received unsubstantiated reports that spammers were already using infected machines to send spam. Technologically savvy spammers can sometimes piggyback on the malevolent code sent by others.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
