Yahoo acquires GeoCities and the MyDoom virus spreads even further. All on today’s On This Day from TEST Huddle.
1999 – Yahoo acquires GeoCities
On this day in 1999, Yahoo! acquires the GeoCities webhosting service for $3.57 billion in stock. Yahoo! will take control of the service on May 28th. The acquisition does not prove very popular for Yahoo as many Geocities users and members will leave the service in response to Yahoo’s new terms of service. At the time of acquisition, GeoCities was the third most visited website on the internet.
2004 – MyDoom Virus returns
On this day in 2004, a new strain of the MyDoom virus (the fastest-spreading worm in history) is discovered. This discovery is only two days after the original virus’ initial attack on January 26th. The variant, Mydoom.B, carries the original worm’s payload (a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) against the SCO Group), but it is also programmed to launch an identical attack against Microsoft’s website beginning on February 3rd and to block access to the websites of over sixty antivirus firms. The MyDoom virus will go on to be responsible for roughly one in five e-mail messages over the following week. This will be the peak of MyDoom’s spread.
