As feared, MyDoom seems to come from Russia. Or does it?

The Moscow Times quotes Kaspersky Labs as saying they used location-sensing software to trace the first e-mails infected with MyDoom back to addresses with Russian Internet providers. “It’s scary, but most serious viruses are written in Russia,” said Denis Zenkov, spokesman for Kaspersky, the country’s largest anti-virus software company.

This is not the first. Russians have long been virus writers. Dumaru, Mimail and Stawin may have Russian origins.

But what has changed in the last year or so, it seems, is the commercialisation of Russian virus writing. These viruses are no longer the product of idle, alienated, out-of-work minds, but of folk working for professional spammers and scammers. Another Kaspersky expert, Alexander Gostiyev, is quoted by AFP as saying the creators of MyDoom were not aiming to disrupt Internet traffic but to use infected computers to distribute unsolicited junk mail. The attack “was very well planned and prepared, perhaps for several months, and at least 1,000 computers were infected in advance,” Gostiyev said. “The virus could be of use above all to criminal groups seeking to distribute spam,” he added.

Spam, however, may be the least of it. There’s not much money to be made from spam, whereas there is from theft. Stawin, for example, records keystrokes when infected victims access their bank accounts, and sends the results to a Russian email address. British police are investigating the possibility that a wave of extortion attempts against gambling sites may come from Russia or Eastern Europe, according to Reuters. These attacks are related to the Superbowl: Those who don’t pay up are brought down by massive traffic, called a Distributed Denial of Service attack, or DDOS. A site dedicated to online betting has recorded at least 20 sports betting sites appeared to have been brought down over the weekend. With all the work that went into something like MyDoom, I can’t believe it’s only spam the creators are after.

Of course, this could all be a feint.

Agence France Presse quotes Kaspersky as saying “there is a still a 20-percent chance that this was an attempt to mislead. Virus programmers from other countries could have registered an email address in Russia” as a ruse. And it’s not entirely clear what Kaspersky means by ‘location sensing software’. This could mean more or less anything, and, as some folk have pointed out, the fact that Kaspersky is based in Russia makes it likely they will receive copies of the virus from Russian email addresses.

And it still leaves us with the fact that the virus was in part tooled to launch an attack on the website SCO, a company that has riled the Open Source community by claiming copyright over parts of the Linux operating system. The virus was designed to launch an attack on their website starting February 1: The website is presently down, apparently overwhelmed by traffic.

One final thing: There seems to be some confusion between the first and second MyDoom virus: Variations often follow when folk get inspired by the success of a virus, but that doesn’t mean the same guy, or guys, wrote both viruses. The presence of a note in English inside the second version of the virus, — sync-1.01; andy; I’m just doing my job, nothing personal, sorry — appears to have confused some folk. The source, and purpose, of the first MyDoom remains a mystery.