Microsoft dodges Mydoom onslaught

Microsoft has escaped unscathed from an attack by a variant of the Mydoom virus that was due to strike today. The software giant's technical resources, bugs in Mydoom.B and the limited spread of the virus all helped to cut damage to a minimum.

The response times of the Microsoft website targeted in the attack have remained largely unchanged.

By contrast SCO's website has been unreachable for days thanks to the data barrage launched by the virus.

Attack plan

The attack on www.microsoft.com started at 13:09 GMT on 3 February and involved all those machines infected by the B variant of the Mydoom virus.

Although Mydoom.A has infected hundreds of thousands of PCs, Mydoom.B has not spread anywhere near as widely.

As a result Microsoft had to weather an attack carried out by a fraction of the number of machines that helped bombard the SCO website with data.

In addition, analysis of the code inside Mydoom.B revealed that only a fraction of these compromised machines will bombard microsoft.com with data at any one time.

The Microsoft website is visited by millions of people everyday which makes it much more likely to cope with a sudden surge in traffic.

As a result when 13:09 GMT ticked round the Microsoft website did not even wobble.

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Full Coverage:  BBCI