SCO offers $250,000 reward for arrest of Mydoom worm author

[William Knowles <wk () c4i org>]

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,89470,00.html

Story by Ken Mingis 
JANUARY 27, 2004
COMPUTERWORLD

The SCO Group Inc. said today it is experiencing a distributed
denial-of-service (DDOS) attack apparently related to the Mydoom worm
that first appeared yesterday.

The company, which is embroiled in legal action against IBM over
intellectual property rights related to its ownership of System V Unix
code, said it is offering a reward of up to $250,000 "for information
leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual or individuals
responsible for creating the Mydoom virus."

In a statement released late today, the company said it has been the
target of several such DDOS attacks during the past 10 months.

But the one now under way "is different and much more troubling, since
it harms not just our company, but also damages the systems and
productivity of a large number of other companies and organizations
around the world," said SCO CEO Darl McBride in the statement. "The
perpetrator of this virus is attacking SCO. ...

"We do not know the origins or reasons for this attack, although we
have our suspicions," said McBride, who did not elaborate on what
those suspicions are. "This is criminal activity and it must be
stopped."

The company also said it is working with U.S. law enforcement
authorities, including the U.S. Secret Service and the FBI, to try to
determine who might be involved in the attack.

The Mydoom worm, also known as Novarg and Mimail.R, is a mass-mailing
worm that arrives via e-mail as an attachment with one of several
possible file extensions, including .bat, .cmd, .exe, .pif, .scr or
.zip. When a user opens the attachment, his computer becomes infected.  
The worm is apparently designed to attack the company's Web site,
www.sco.com, beginning on Feb. 1.

Experts have said that the Mydoom worm is spreading faster than last
year's Sobig.F, which topped the charts as the most widespread e-mail
worm of 2003.

Both Network Associates Inc. and Symantec Corp. said that when the
attached file is executed, the worm scans the user's system for e-mail
addresses and forwards itself to those addresses. If the victim has a
copy of the Kazaa file-sharing application installed, it will also
drop several files in the shared-files folder in an attempt to spread
that way.

According to Symantec, the worm also installs a "key logger" that can
capture anything that is entered, including passwords and credit card
numbers, and will start sending requests for data to SCO's Web site.  
If enough requests are sent, the SCO site could be forced off-line.




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