Posted on 07/26/2004 12:22:14 PM PDT by FourPeas
update Major Internet search engines were crippled Monday morning by a variant of the MyDoom worm, rendering Google inaccessible to many users and slowing results from Yahoo.
The attack also affected smaller engines, including Alta Vista, a Yahoo subsidiary, and Lycos.
Google representatives confirmed that the MyDoom worm affected performance of the search engine, but, despite numerous e-mail complaints received by News.com, said the attack had a limited impact.
"At no point was the Google Web site significantly impaired, and service for all users and networks is expected to be restored shortly," the company said in a statement.
A Lycos representative said the company is aware of the problem and is working to block the performance obstacles.
"It is kind of an inadvertent DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack," said Craig Schmugar, a virus researcher at McAfee Avert. The sites are being knocked out in the search for more e-mail addresses. This is a twist on MyDoom: earlier variants looked for e-mail addresses on the host hard drive. The latest version is now running queries on search engines.
"Once infected, a machine might send thousands of requests," Schmugar said. If a computer is only a few years old and connected to the Internet via broadband, the user probably won't notice the slight decrease of his machine's performance, he speculated.
Internet performance management company Keynote Systems said it noticed on Monday morning a dip in the average performance of the top 40 sites it measured. The availability of those sites rarely dips below 99 percent, according to Della Lowe, a Keynote representative, but over the last two hours availability has been below that.
"That suggests there could be some wider Internet problem, but we're still researching the data," Lowe said.
Google users were especially taken aback by the search outage. Todd Breslow of Philadelphia was hoping to use Google to search for the proper way to manipulate image border colors when doing Web development, but instead had to turn to MSN's search to complete his query.
"I have just come back from lunch and Google is STILL not reachable," Breslow said in an e-mail interview. "General thoughts in the office are shock and awe."
The problems were occurring just as Google set the price range--$108 to $135 per share--for its initial public offering. Google filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise as much as $3.3 billion. The company is issuing 24.6 million shares.
The company plans to list its shares under the ticker GOOG, according to the filing. Google has already registered to trade on the Nasdaq exchange.
No date has been set yet for the IPO.
An interesting thought just occurred to me. Internet traffic is way up; monitoring that traffic for the appropriate "chatter" very well might be harder under these conditions. Hmmmmmm.
Ignore my post. It doesn't apply to the current MyDoom.
>>The problems were occurring just as Google set the price range--$108 to $135 per share-
Google is starting to look like it has a left wing extremist bias.
It seems to prefer to serve up Kerry-friendly pages and stories, and Bush-bashing pages and stories.
If that's true, I wouldn't give $1.98 per share for the stock!
bttfl
FYI
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.