Posted: 02nd Mar, 2006 By: MarkJ
SoftScan, a Scandinavian email security service, has published its list of the top five virus families for last month. Interestingly Netsky remains the dominant player, while most e-mail is just SPAM (85.6%):
The top five virus families in February [were]:
1. Netsky 27.79%
2. Phishing 23.69%
3. Mytob 17.79%
4. Bagle 14.34%
5. Nyxem 5.99%
Despite being occasionally knocked further back down the order by other malware such as Sober, Netsky consistently accounts for a large proportion of viral email traffic. In the UK alone, SoftScan has identified that there are at least seven times as many unique IP addresses that distribute emails infected with Netsky than Mytob and four times as many than Bagle.
Compared to other viruses, the number of Netsky infected machines is remarkably high considering that the last outbreak was in 2004. Clearly many people still do not properly protect their machines.