posted on Tuesday, July 27, 2004 1:04 PM
by
demiliani
Curiosity of MyDoom...
Yesterday Google (and seems also other big search engines) was down for a big attack of a new variant of MyDoom virus (MyDoom.O).
The type of attack is always the same: a big number of simultaneous requests directed to the search engine at the same time.
This new variant of MyDoom spreads itself as usually via email and, when it infects a computer, it starts looking for email addresses on the infected computer and also (and this was the yesterday problem) starts a big search on search engines (like Google) for email addresses. Seems that Google has received a lot of query with arguments like these:
"Delivery failed", "Message could not be delivered", "Mail System Error - Returned Mail", "Delivery reports about your e-mail", "Returned mail: see transcript for details", "Returned mail: Data format error instruction", "MAILER-DAEMON", "Mail Administrator", "Automatic Email Delivery Software", "Post Office", "Bounced mail", "Returned mail", "Mail Delivery Subsystem".
You can try by simply do a query with one of the items above (like THIS for example). Can you see how many mail addresses you could obtain?
This is a problem... Search Engines must start thinking a way to obfuscate email addresses (and obviously users must always do it).