"Sobig-F unquestionably wins the dubious title of 'Worm of the year'."
Said Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant for Sophos, in a report today. He continued,
"It spread more ferociously than any virus ever seen before, swamping email inboxes. Some companies reported seeing hundreds of thousands of infected emails every day. Throughout the year, in the run-up to Sobig-F, the worm's author released new variants of Sobig almost as if he were seeing which techniques would be the most successful.
Ironically some of the people worst impacted by Sobig-F were the spammers. They found that they could not send their millions of spams as easily because their email gateways were deluged by Sobig traffic. Microsoft has issued a substantial financial reward for evidence leading to the arrest and conviction of Sobig's author, but we seem to be no closer to identifying him or her."
Many people will remember Blaster, the virus that tried to take the Windows Update webservice offline back in August, well Sobig even managed to beat it, having 4% more reports from the wild.
The top ten viruses of the year are:
• Sobig-F 19.9%
• Blaster-A 15.1%
• Nachi-A 8.4%
• Gibe-F 7.2%
• Dumaru-A 6.1%
• Sober-A 5.8%
• MiMail-A 4.8%
• BugBear-B 3.1%
• Sobig-E 2.9%
• Klez-H 1.6
• Others 25.1%
Sobig, Blaster and Nachi were all released in August 2003, making it the single worst month for viruses, ever.
Sophos have detected in excess of 7,000 new viruses this year alone.
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