MyDoom-o strikes

Viruses (well, worms actually) have always been important, whether you are
a Windows user and get the brunt of them, or whether you are a sysadmin
protecting your win32 minions from death-by-email and some have been
significant over the years.

The first MyDoom virus that came out was probably one of the most
memorable of the recent viruses, but today's revision: MyDoom-O is
even more intelligent.

Rather than going through peoples address books, relying on the viruses
success of penetration to pass on the virus, MyDoom-O uses millions of
combinations to obtain valid email addresses using search engines such
as Google, Yahoo!, Lycos and Altavista. The big problem lies herein:
the virus, as it reaches critical mass is DDos'ing the search engines --
making the search engines unresponsive to everyone else. Not only
can this virus kill the search engines for a temporary amount of time,
it can also reach far more netizens than ever before because of it's
non-reliance on end-users machines.

Some viruses are boring and don't do much, but somebody thought
"hey, wouldn't it be fun to get the search engines to do the hard work"
(and maybe, as an afterthought, idealised on the fact that the search
engines might be DDOSed as a result). I certainly don't advocate
virii in any way shape or form, but every now and again, new viruses
come out that make a new revolution in the way that viruses will work
from then on. First, it was .COM or .EXE based (mainly assembly coded)
droppers which infected files and would do something nasty, or not so
nasty (like displaying a message on your screen once in a while), then it
was email distribution, then it was address book distribution and now
finally could it be search engine distribution, opening up the possibility for
globalised distribution for anyone who is mentioned on the net?

Google and the likes will no doubt familiarise themselves to the
calling-cards of such virii requests in the future, but will this cripple
search engines eventually? Who knows!

See ya.