Mydoom Creators Ask For Job In Anti-Virus Industry, Reports Sophos

The creators of the latest versions of the MyDoom email worm have embedded a secret message inside their code, asking for a job in the anti-virus industry, researchers at Sophos have discovered.

The MyDoom-V and MyDoom-U worms, spread via email in the form of an email file attachment. If innocent users launch the malicious file, the worms activate and may attempt to download a backdoor Trojan horse called Surila.

Hidden inside these worm’s code is a message which does not get displayed on infected users’ computers:

‘We searching 4 work in AV industry.’

“It’s hard to tell if the creators of these new versions of the MyDoom worm are being serious, but there is no way that anybody in the anti-virus industry would touch them with a bargepole,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. “It’s very simple – if you write a virus, we will never ever employ you. Not only is it deeply unethical to write malicious code, but it raises issues as to whether you could ever be trusted to develop the software which protects millions of users around the world from attack every day.”

Sophos believes the skills required to write reliable anti-virus software are very different from those shown by a virus writer.

“Anti-virus software is much more difficult to write than a computer virus. Anti-virus developers have to ensure that their software works reliably, detecting more than 90,000 computer viruses on a wide variety of operating systems and network configurations without making mistakes or causing problems. Virus writers don’t care if their code crashes or causes incompatabilities – you don’t have to be a genius to write a virus,” continued Cluley.