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[NeonWizard]

A pesky new variant of the MyDoom worm slammed four popular search engines Monday and continued to clog e-mail accounts around the world.

The new version, variously dubbed MyDoom.M or MyDoom.O, was first detected early Monday morning and quickly went on a tear, flooding many mailboxes with hundreds of messages. It has also slowed Google, Yahoo, AltaVista and Lycos to a crawl, because once it infects a PC, the virus automatically performs Web searches on those search engines.

E-mail screening company MessageLabs said it had intercepted more than 23,000 copies of the variants in the first five hours of their existence. McAfee Avert, the virus-tracking squad at the antivirus software maker, rated the worm a "medium on watch," or right below a high-risk vulnerability. Tens of thousands of PCs have been infected by the worm, which was first detected just before 6 a.m. PDT. The biggest impact, however, has been on the search engines.

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