While the threat landscape has changed dramatically over the past 15 years, there have been a few constant factors. Surprisingly, the MyDoom worm is one of those, researchers with Palo Alto Networks have found. MyDoom is a destructive worm that once took down Google for a day, and even generated up to one-fourth of all emails being sent around the globe at some point.
New research shows that MyDoom still generates 1% of email messages containing malware, which is very impressive for a 15-year-old threat. According to Alex Hinchliffe of Palo Alto Networks, “the main reason for the high and consistent volume of Mydoom malware is that once infected, Mydoom will work aggressively to find other email addresses on the victim’s system to send itself on to.” Because the worm is designed to send out emails containing copies of itself from infected devices, “the malware is self-sufficient and could continue to do this forever, so long as people open the email attachments”.
Read more: MyDoom: The 15-year-old malware that’s still being used in phishing attacks in 2019
