Net worm knocks US site out of commission

The MyDoom Internet worm claimed its first scalp yesterday, paralysing the Web site of American software firm SCO Group with a massive data blitz.

In a statement issued yesterday morning, the Utah-based company confirmed MyDoom knocked its site, http://www.sco.com, out of commission.

“Internet traffic began building momentum Saturday evening and by midnight Eastern Time the SCO Web site was flooded with requests beyond its capacity, the statement read.

The speed and severity of the attack surprised security officials. “It was spectacularly successful,” said Mikko Hypponen, research manager at Finnish anti-virus firm F-Secure.

There were no other reports of outages.

MyDoom.A, also known as Novarg or Shimgapi, emerged on Monday last in the form of a spam e-mail message that contained a well-disguised virus attachment.

It was programmed to take control of unsuspecting computer users’ PCs from which it would launch a debilitating denial-of-service attack on SCO yesterday.

Microsoft Corp has been targeted by a second variant of MyDoom, dubbed MyDoom.B. That attack is timed to kick off tomorrow.

Security officials have warned computer users to delete suspicious e-mail messages that appear to come from “Mail Administrator” and other official-looking addresses that contains a file attachment.