Posted: 27th Jul, 2004 By: MarkJ
It's being reported that a variant of the MyDoom e-mail virus (worm) was responsible for hampering the GOOGLE online search engine yesterday:
First reports of the problems with the UK service started emerging at around 1530 GMT (1630 BST). Instead of getting a page of results, some users in the UK, US and France were confronted with a server error instead. Other net users have reported no problems.
In a statement Google said on Monday night: "The Google search engine experienced slowness for a short period of time earlier today because of the MyDoom virus, which flooded major search engines with automated searches.
A small number of users and networks that have the MyDoom virus have been affected for a longer period of time. At no point was the Google website significantly impaired."The MyDoom-O variant appears to have attacked Google using an untraditional distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), which also targeted rival search engines as well.
Worryingly it's claimed that the new virus can look for new addresses to infect by searching online forums and web pages through search engines. So thats one more reason why your details should always be kept private. More @
BBC News Online.