Estimated read time: Less than a minute
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
(Lindon-AP) -- Technical consultants at The S-C-O Group are working overtime to combat a widespread virus designed specifically to overload the company's Web site tomorrow.
However, spokesman Blake Stowell admits maybe only an act of God might fix the problem.
The fast-spreading virus, called "Mydoom" among other names, runs on computers with Microsoft Windows operating systems. The virus is spread through e-mail attachments.
It's usually started when a recipient clicks on an e-mail attachment. Then 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.
Besides sending out tainted e-mail, the program appears to open up a backdoor so that hackers can take over the computer later.
It targets S-C-O and Microsoft by ordering computers to bombard the companies' Web sites with access requests in an attempt to crash their servers. The SCO attack is supposed to start tomorrow, the attack on Microsoft two days later.
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)