Thursday, December 09, 2004

And the Winner is...

According to security software maker Sophos, the worse virus of the year award goes to...Netsky-P. This pesky little devil accounted for over 22% of all virus reports monitored by Sophos. It was first discovered in March and is only one of 30 variants of Netsky.

In second place was is Zafi-B, which accounted for 19% of the reports. Zafi was first discovered in April. The fact that these two viruses are still infecting computers after so many month is tell-tall in itself. It means that people and businesses and home users are still running without virus protection or are not updating the software with the latest virus updates. Sophos believes that home users are the worst offenders and they are the ones passing it along to businesses.

Sven Jaschan, the self-confessed author of the Netsky and Sasser worms, was taken into custody by German police in May. He is scheduled to go to trial early next year. His viruses, however, continue to live on, accounting for more than 50 percent of all virus reports this year, according to Sophos.

The other sad part of this story is that virus attacks were up 52% in 2004 over the previous year. Sophos expects even more attacks this year.

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