26 July 2004 | Author: Andrew Girdwood Head of Strategy

Virus brings Google down!

Many users are reporting errors from Google. Rather than search results a "service error -27" page is displayed instead. The page is Google's custom 503 error page. A 503 error is reserved for a server under too much strain.

Yahoo's search features are simply failing, as are Lycos' and AltaVista.

Early investigation points the finger at a huge number of "searches" sent to these engines. The surge in traffic has many of the signatures of a DDoS attack.

Anti-virus experts report that MyDoom.0 infected machines scan files for domain names. Once a domain name has been found by the virus it searches these target engines for valid email addresses at these domains. This allows the virus to send itself to these addresses, massively increasing its distribution.

[Updated: 17:50]

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