Financial doom as virus hits
2004-01-29 15:16
London - The MyDoom virus is highly sophisticated and it may be part of a new class of Distributed Intelligent Malware Agents (DIMA) researched by the military establishments in some G8 countries for years, according to mi2g, the world leader in digital risk.
mi2g's Intelligence had predicted on January 13, 2003 that within the coming two years the world would witness the emergence of a new generation of viruses, the DIMA.
According to mi2g, for the first time, MyDoom fulfills seven of the ten characteristics of DIMA as published earlier.
"It is however likely that the real purpose of MyDoom is still obscure. It would seem that a vast army of millions of infected computers is being assembled by the MyDoom DIMA so that those zombies can then be used to direct attacks at will."
MyDoom has now spread to over 190 countries across the globe and has climbed to become the 3rd worst malware of all time in less than 72 hours, according to the ranking table maintained by the mi2g Intelligence Unit.
Large and small organisations plus home users have been reporting severe online delays, congestion and e-mail service disruption for well over three days in many instances.
At present rates, MyDoom is the fastest spreading malware of all time.
"With the recent hike in infections, MyDoom has become comparable in destruction to Sobig - the worst malware of all time, which caused $37bn of economic damage worldwide primarily in late 2003," according to mi2g.
Worst malware
The ranking table of the top ten worst malware of all time showing economic damage in brackets is as follows:
- Sobig ($37.1bn)
- Klez ($19.8bn)
- MyDoom ($19.6bn)
- Mimail ($11.5bn)
- Yaha ($11.5bn)
- Swen ($10.4bn)
- Love Bug ($8.8bn)
- BugBear ($3.9bn)
- Dumaru ($3.8bn)
- SirCam ($3.0bn)
The MyDoom DIMA family has several other features revealing a purpose not merely limited to an assault on SCO or Microsoft - the presence of a key logging Trojan suggests a possible motivation connected to identity theft, eBusiness and online transaction fraud.
MyDoom's tactic of generating random e-mail addresses to propagate itself - a technique commonly used by spammers to find new targets - suggests a possible connection with the spammer community.
"The MyDoom episode has just begun and there is more to follow given the millions of infected computers now waiting for remote command," said DK Matai, executive chairperson of mi2g.
The global economic damage from overt and covert hacker attacks, spam, phishing scams, denial of service attacks and malware proliferation is estimated to be between $23.3bn and $28.5bn so far in 2004 by the mi2g Intelligence Unit.
The total economic damage from all types of digital risk manifestation in 2003 - the worst year on record - was estimated to be between $185bn and $226bn worldwide.