Another Virus

[decadence]

Virus Spread is Fastest Ever

A VIRUS has been declared the fastest-spreading e-mail plague of all time, while another malicious programme that hit last week has continued to disrupt computers worldwide.

MessageLabs, a company that filters e-mail for corporate clients around the world, said it had intercepted more than a million copies of the "Sobig.F" virus the previous day - the most it has ever intercepted in a single day.

That was one in every 17 e-mail messages the firm scanned.

"That's just a number we've never seen before," said Brian Czarny, MessageLabs' marketing director.

The most widespread virus of all time, "Klez", at its peak accounted for one in 125 messages scanned.

Sobig.F continued to spread aggressively, though the pace eased off a bit to about one in 60 messages, he said.

The virus, which is the sixth and latest strain of a virus that first emerged in January, spreads through Windows PCs via e-mail and corporate networks.

Besides clogging e-mail systems with messages carrying subject lines like "Re: Details" and "Re: Wicked screensaver," the virus also deposits a Trojan horse, or hacker back door, that can be used to turn victims' PCs into relayers of spam e-mail.

"It's a seeding," Mr Czarny said. "All they're looking to do is plant that Trojan."

Another virus, of the self-spreading kind called a "worm" first appeared last week and was still causing problems yesterday.

The worm, dubbed "Blaster" spreads through Internet connections to PCs using versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system that haven't been fixed for a programming flaw.

Microsoft disclosed the error, and provided a patch, on July 16.

Blaster was followed this week by the derivative "Nachi" or "Welchia" which attempts to inoculate computers by downloading the patch from Microsoft.

However, the new worm is causing more problems than Blaster, and brought down Air Canada's ticketing systems.