Microsoft’s web properties remain fully available to customers, the company said in a prepared statement. We did make it a priority to ensure that Microsoft websites, such as Windows Update, remained fully available to our customers.
The week-old B variant had a much lower propagation rate than the original, so its zombie network had limited bandwidth available for the DDoS. Microsoft’s infrastructure is also designed to handle more traffic than most.
One of MyDoom.B’s effects is to block the infected PC from accessing anti-virus web sites, but Microsoft took the precaution of mirroring its antivirus information pages at an unaffected domain (information.microsoft.com).
The company would not talk about any other countermeasures it had in place, presumably out of fear that attackers would attempt to find their way around them in future attacks. In previous attacks, Microsoft has resorted to DNS tricks to evade outages.
The SCO Group Inc was hit hard by the more prolific A variant of the worm on Sunday, and had to resort to mirroring its downed www.sco.com site at www.thescogroup.com until the attack lets up on February 12.
Both Microsoft and SCO are separately offering $250,000 rewards to anybody providing information leading to the arrest and conviction of the writers of the worms responsible for the respective attacks.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
