The most recent version of the e-mail worm uses search engines to find new victims to infect and may be the cause of delays on Google, AltaVista, MSN* and Yahoo.

A new variant of the MyDoom worm that hit the Internet hard on Monday is causing massive e-mail slowdowns across the Web, and it may be to blame for problems plaguing several search engines.

Variously named MyDoom.M, MyDoom.M@mm or MyDoom.O, the new worm is little different from its predecessors in most of its behaviors and characteristics. But its one distinguishing feature is that it uses search engines to find new victims to infect. This may have been to blame for the delays that hit most of the popular search engines early Monday, including Google, AltaVista, MSN* and Yahoo.

Once the worm infects a machine, it searches the PC for e-mail addresses and then begins mailing itself out. But it also uses the search engines to find other valid e-mail addresses in the same domains as the ones it finds on the infected machine.

For More Details Red E-week Article
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1627771,00.asp

*My Experience