Anti-virus company Sophos has revealed that the Sobig-F worm accounted for almost a fifth of all infections reported to the company during 2003, making it the hardest-hitting virus of the year.
"The mass-mailing Sobig-F worm shrugged off stiff competition for the top spot from the infamous Blaster worm, which attempted to knock a Microsoft Web site off the Internet. Both these viruses - plus the third-placed Nachi worm - hit businesses and home users during August 2003, making it the worst single month in virus history.
The top five viruses of the year are:
1) W32/Sobig-F (19.9%)
2) W32/Blaster-A (15.1%)
3) W32/Nachi-A (8.4%)
4) W32/Gibe-F (7.2%)
5) W32/Dumaru-A (6.1%)
"Sobig-F spread more ferociously than any virus ever seen before, swamping e-mail inboxes. Some companies reported seeing hundreds of thousands of infected e-mails every day," says Brett Myroff, CEO of local Sophos distributor, Netxactics.
"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 spammers. They found they could not send their millions of spams as easily because their e-mail 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," continues Myroff.
Blasted
Blaster, the year's second most prevalent worm, spread by exploiting a critical security hole in versions of Windows. Containing a mocking message for Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates, it attempted to blast one of Microsoft's Web sites off the Internet, leading the industry giant to take evasive action.
The third placed Nachi worm tried to undo the damage done to computers infected by the Blaster worm, but in reality it only added to the chaos, Myroff says. Both Blaster and Nachi continue to infect unprotected computers four months later.
Sophos has detected 7 064 new viruses, worms and Trojan horses to date this year, bringing the total protected against to more than 86 000.
Many other virus and spam developments have taken place during 2003. Sophos predicts that the following trends will continue to affect users well into the future: spammers will find new methods, disparate legislative approach is a toothless response, spammers have been adopting complicated techniques to get their messages through scanners, including mixing innocent and bad text and using invalid HTML code or random characters to break up "spammy" words.
New adaptive filtering techniques are combating the problem, and companies are increasingly looking for a consolidated solution that protects against both spam and viruses.
Myroff says comprehensive international legislation is needed to discourage those companies considering spam e-mail marketing.
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