[Hmm ...] Six Degrees of MyDoom ...

[dancefloorlandmine]

Well, my Lycos email has just received its first notification that someone (at provost.umass.edu) has received a MyDoom virus email purporting to be from me. Now trying to remember whether MyDoom scavs"sender" addresses from the net, or from the user's contacts ... in which case it could be the new Six Degrees thing. Trying to work out who the common link would be ... [grin]

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

http://spftools.infinitepenguins.net/

doomed

[fire-kitten.livejournal.com]

we are all doomed I tell you

[thepaintedone.livejournal.com]

I can't say whether this applies to MyDoom, but certainly some viruses don't just read the contacts, but also scan the e-mails in the mailbox. Which means all those jokes you sent to someone, which they then forwarded with headers quoted to thier entire address book (repeat a few hundred times), end up being read. I've seen joke mails going through our company system with literally hundreds of e-mail addresses quoted bellow the joke, it's insane. You have litterally no control over where your e-mail address ends up these days.

[rms.livejournal.com]

Mydoom.A and Mydoom.B take an address from the contacts list (and possibly the inbox) of the infected machine and then fakes the email from that address. So the fact it alledgely came from you probably means that someone you know got infected. Someone at work got mydoom alledgedly from themselves.

And the A version of the virus wasn't supposed to target .edu email addresses but I don't know about any others.

Re:

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Thats what I meant - it is a connection between me and someone I don't know. Wonder if people should consider emailing the people who allegedly got Mydoom from them and introducing themselves - sort of like calling numbers from your friend's phone-books and saying hi. Hmmm ... with that analogy, probably not such a good idea ... [grin]