Google slowed by worm?

This afternoon, the new variant of the MyDoom worm arrived in my inbox, complete with the usual infected zip file. It transpired that a lot of XP users must have clicked on it because Google and other major search engines were bombarded by infected machines. The interesting development is that, in addition to ransacking victim’s address books and hard drives for other potential victims, it also causes infected machines to bombard search engines with queries seeking email addresses. “Those search requests have been overloading the search engines,” said Lloyd Taylor, vice president of technology for Keynote Systems Inc., which measures Web site performance. The worm, Taylor said, was believed to be slowing performance on Google, AltaVista, and Yahoo. Looks as though the automatic unzipping facility in XP has a serious downside. Here’s the BBC Online report.