CNN has a news story up with details on the threat that the new MyDoom worm is posing to emails everywhere. If you’ve received an email with “The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment.” or something similar with an attachment, that is the MyDoom worm.

It seems that this worm’s primary goal is to launch an attack on the SCO Group (don’t be surprised if the site doesn’t come up.) SCO are largely in the limelight lately because they’re accusing Linux of using code they created, and a lot of “hackers” don’t like that. Hence the attack. Note to these wannabe “hackers”, innocent until proven guilty is plain common sense in America, and common sense is a God-given gift — use it.

How do you protect yourself from this attack? Simply do not open any attachments from anyone you don’t know. Even if you know that person, still run a virus check on that file to make sure that person didn’t fall for the worm and is unintentionally and unknowingly sending you the worm as well. It’s appalling how many people fall for lame stunts like this. As Emeril would say, use your knob, people!