New MyDoom Worm Variant Affects Search Engines Too

New MyDoom Worm Variant Affects Search Engines Too New MyDoom Worm Variant Affects Search Engines Too Top 20 Viewed Articles 1 How can I uninstall the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine (JVM) from Windows XP? 2 A First Look at Windows Firewall 3 What You Need to Know About Windows Update Services 4 New MyDoom Worm Variant Affects Search Engines Too 5 Microsoft Releases Office 2003 SP1 More Top Viewed Articles Related Topics • Security Mark Joseph Edwards InstantDoc #43365 Paul Thurrott's WinInfo A new MyDoom worm variant, MyDoom.M@mm, was discovered on July 26. Computers affected by the worm are used to perform queries on various search engines to harvest email addresses. According to reports, a significant number of computers were affected by the worm and as a result, affected computers caused some amount of strain on popular search engines, including Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo, and Google. According to Symantec's analysis, the worm collects email addresses from a user's system by parsing various files such as the Outlook address book file, as well as files with common extension (.asp, .php, .pl, .dbx, and others) known to sometimes contain email address. The worm spreads by emailing copies of itself to harvested email addresses using its own built-in SMTP engine, where the email might appear to be a mail delivery error message from a mail given server.