Leading anti-virus firm Sophos has published a report revealing the top ten viruses causing problems for businesses around the world during the month of May 2005.
The report reveals that the new Sober-N worm has toppled Zafi-D, which dominated the top of the virus chart for the previous five months. The bilingual Sober-N virus, which poses as tickets for the 2006 World Cup in Germany, was detected at the beginning of the month and rapidly spread across 40 countries - accounting for 4.5% of all email at its peak.
The top ten viruses in May 2005 were as follows:
1 W32/Sober-N 43.8%
2 W32/Zafi-D 14.5%
3 W32/Netsky-P 13.1%
4 W32/Netsky-D 3.1%
5 W32/Zafi-B 2.0%
6 W32/Mytob-AZ 1.6%
7 W32/Mytob-Z 1.5%
7 W32/Netsky-Z 1.5%
7 W32/Mytob-E 1.5%
10 W32/Netsky-N 1.4%
Others 16.0%
Carole Theriault, security consultant at Sophos, said,
"Sober-N stormed to the top of the chart in early May, making it one of the biggest outbreaks so far this year. This manipulative email worm spread quickly, using social engineering tricks, such as offering free World Cup tickets, to entice recipients into opening the infected attachment. The Sober-Q Trojan, released a few weeks later, searched for computers infected with Sober-N and attempted to secretly turn them into spamming machines. The spam subject lines included 'Dresden Bombing Is To Be Regretted Enormously', 'Armenian Genocide Plagues Ankara 90 Years On', 'Dresden 1945' and 'Turkish Tabloid Enrages Germany with Nazi Comparisons'.
This month also sees another new entry - Mytob-AZ. This is another mass-mailing worm accompanied by a backdoor Trojan, allowing others to access the infected user's computer. Despite only accounting for 1.6% of viruses in May, it is a concern due to the severe damage it causes to businesses."
Research by Sophos shows that 2.6%, or 1 in 38 emails, circulating during the month of May were viral - a small increase on the previous month.
|
|
Reader Comments: 0
