[Fsfe-ie] RTE Morning Ireland piece on MyDoom virus

[Fergal Daly]

On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 11:32:46AM +0000, Ben North wrote:
> Quoting adam beecher <lists at beecher.net>:
> > [Ben North wrote:]
> > > [...] other sources of information point more at a
> > > Russian criminal origin, aiming to use the machines to send spam.  The
> > > SCO/Microsoft DOS in this case would be a decoy.
> >
> > I find this theory just as unlikely as the "linux fan" hypothesis, probably
> > something thought up by the media whores in mi2g and swallowed whole by the
> > media luvvies that adore them. Seriously, if you were a "russian criminal"
> > (Senator McCarthy would be proud) and you contracted some hacker to create a
> > worm for you for this purpose, would you feel you were getting your money's
> > worth if the hacker built in a DDoS tool that announced the worm to the
> > world? It defies logic.
> 
> Well, possibly, if it did distract attention from the real purpose of
> the worm.  But you're right; this is all heavily speculative.  Maybe
> it's not worth making a fuss about.

The virus has all the bits necessary to turn your machine into a spam zombie
and include code to allow delivery and execution of arbitrary binaries,
which could be keyboard sniffers or whatever.

It was definitely not originally developed by open source people. The only
possibility for open source involvement would be that some OS advocate who
is also a fool took a current virus and modified it to flood SCO and MS. The
problem with that theory is that MyDoom is not a simple derivative of a
current virus and anyone who could add the SCO stuff would probably have
ripped out the other shite before propogating it.

This virus is the most virulent so far, it was going to big news with or
without SCO attacks. The SCO stuff provides a handy story to keep the press
away from the fact that it turns your machine into tool for criminals and
spammers. Pretty clever cos it's working,

F