Elain Brown Tech 03.18.2022 12:Mar PM EDT

[VIRAL FLASHBACK] Mydoom Virus: Why Is It Considered the Worst Computer Virus in History?

Mydoom was born on Jan. 26, 2004, and after which, the whole computer world changed.

What Is Mydoom?

The Mydoom virus was created almost 15 years ago. Mydoom is known to be one of the world's most destructive viruses and the fastest spreading virus in 2004.

At one point, the Mydoom virus became the most widespread, affecting a quarter of all the emails sent globally. Mydoom has been written in history as the worst virus outbreak in internet history causing up to $38 billion in damages.

If the data of damages is converted with today's price, the total damage cost would reach around $52.2 billion. Mydoom is also named Novarg. This malware spread and infected more than 50 million computers worldwide.

Furthermore, due to its destructive nature, it was able to take down Google search engine in a short while. Mydoom is considered to be the most successful computer virus in history, at least from a certain perspective.

GetSupport reported that the malicious malware Mydoom has two kinds: the Mydoom.A and Mydoom.B.

However, there was a significant difference between them. The A-variant appeared to be solely focused on SCO's websites, whereas the B-variant appeared to be targeting Microsoft Windows as well as several popular antivirus websites at the time.

How Does Mydoom Spread?

The Mydoom computer worm is a malicious malware that spreads and targets computers running Microsoft Windows.

This worm became so widespread through mass emailing. The malware hunts for email addresses from the infected device, collects them, and sends copies of itself to the email addresses gathered in the infected device.

At that point, emails with unusual subject lines began to arrive in inboxes all over the world. The emails appeared to be errors of some sort, with a message advising the user to open the attachment in order to see the message itself, according to the message.

As explained by HP, "It also roped those infected machines into a web of computers called a botnet that performed distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks were intended to shut down a target website or server."

It has been more than a decade since the worm spread like wildfire on the internet. Unfortunately, the malicious malware still spreads on the internet generating 1% of the phishing emails being sent.

As stated by HP, there are 3.4 billion phishing emails sent daily, and 1.4 billion of those are covered by the Mydoom malware.

Due to the destructive nature of Mydoom, a prize money of $250,000 was offered to anyone who would know who was the developer behind this malicious worm.

Assuming that the developer of the Mydoom virus truthfully caused chaos among most of the computers worldwide, the developer was never caught.

How to Protect Your Device From Mydoom

Here are several precautionary measures for users to safeguard themselves in acquiring the Mydoom virus, as recommended by Panda Security.

Users are advised to install a reliable antivirus program on their computer; An antivirus that would best suit a user's needs.
After installing an antivirus, it is highly recommended to keep the antivirus software up to date. If automatic updates are available, make sure the antivirus software is configured to use them.
Another cybersecurity protection in line is to assure that the antivirus is enabled at all times.
As stated, users should remind themselves that mydoom or any malicious worm can infect a computer by infecting a file with the CMD extension. It is advised for users to check files included in the list of extensions.
It is especially important to exercise caution when downloading files from peer-to-peer file-sharing programs. Another cybersecurity measure to avoid mydoom is to not open them unless the user has verified that they are virus-free beforehand.
Lastly, Panda states that: "If you have filtering tools installed, configure them to reject messages with the characteristics described in the section Means of transmission. If, in spite of doing this, you receive the message that contains the virus: do not open it, do not run the attached file and delete it, making sure that you also delete it from the Deleted Items folder."