RIAA site taken down again by virus

The Recording Industry Association of America's website has been down for nearly five days with a variant of the MyDoom virus being identified as the likeliest reason for the outage.

According to website performance monitoring firm Netcraft the downtime has already exceeded the four-day outage in July 2002 which was attributed to a denial of service attack.

The MyDoom mass-mailing variant started spreading in February through email, infecting Windows computers whenever people clicked on the attached file. The number of computers infected by the virus is unknown. The program has been causing compromised systems to attack Microsoft's and the RIAA's sites between March 17 to March 22.

The RIAA refused to comment on the outage, except to confirm that the site is currently inaccessible. The group would not specify how long the outage has lasted.

Microsoft's website remains up. The software giant could not immediately be reached for comment.

Robert Lemos writes for News.com