Virus worms its way into BYU computers

Upon activation — usually when a recipient clicks on an e-mail attachment — the rogue program searches though address books and sends itself to e-mail addresses it finds. It chooses one as the sender, so recipients may believe the message comes from someone known.

Unlike other mass-mailing worms, Mydoom does not attempt to trick victims by promising nude pictures of celebrities or mimicking personal notes. Rather, messages carry innocuous-sounding subject lines, like "Error" or "Server Report" and messages in the body such as "Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available."

It is precisely because the message's tone is so basic that many computer users conditioned to be suspect of attachments wound up opening Mydoom anyway, said Chuck Adams, chief security officer with NetSolve Inc., a security firm in Austin, Texas.

Some corporate networks were clogged with infected traffic within hours of its appearance Monday, and operators of many systems voluntarily shut down their e-mail to keep the worm from spreading during the cleanup.

Keynote Systems Inc., which tracks Internet performance, recorded a slight degradation in Web site availability and speed.

The worm, however, falls short of a homeland security or national security threat, said Amit Yoran, the U.S. government's cyber-security chief.

Mydoom infects computers that run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating systems, though other computers were affected by network slowdowns and a flood of bogus messages. Unlike other recent attacks, it does not appear to exploit any Windows security flaw.

BYU officials planned Tuesday to send a follow-up message to students to remind them that they can use free antivirus software from Symantec to get rid of the virus and to protect their machines. The company reached an agreement with the university last fall after the Sobig virus wreaked havoc with university and student computers.

Harker said BYU has taken precautions that should make it nearly impossible for a worm or virus to strike at such an inopportune time.

"The worm was lucky this time," Harker said. "It won't get lucky in the future, nor any other worm."

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