January 28, 2004
MYDOOM AIMED AT SCO
Everyone I talked to over the past two days had come in contact with the Mydoom virus. This virus spread extremely fast and even shut down mail servers at large corporations such as Boeing. It seems to me that only the ignorant are affected. This virus was sent in the form of a zip file attachment. If you didn’t open it, you shouldn’t get the virus. However, once opened the virus aggressively searches the computer for email addresses and sends itself to everyone of them. It also plants itself in the shared folder for the P2P program called Kazaa. It amazes me how many people blindly open attachments without knowing what it is or where it came from.
The interesting story behind this virus is that it appears to be aimed to injure SCO. It is reported that on February 1st this virus will send all the data collected from each computer it infected to the SCO servers. Why would someone want to do this? If you are only a Windows user you probably won’t care. SCO is currently in the process of suing Linux claiming that it contains proprietary code that belongs to SCO. This has angered the Linux community. Linux is free software and is an alternative to the Windows operating system. Over the years it has been tweaked, twisted, and modified in many ways to do many things. The fact that it is free means that SCO doesn’t make any money. The fact that it is free means that Linux users want to keep it that way. It is obviously suspected that the Linux community is behind the Mydoom virus. Go figure.
We are using a Linux based O/S in house at S&K. Our firewall runs a program called Smoothwall. This is a Linux based O/S that you can check out by going to www.smoothwall.org. This is the slickest software I have seen for firewall and VPN use. We are selling it as a complete firewall and VPN solution. You can purchase the complete system for $315.50. Many of our customers are already raving about it. Check it out!
S&K