Sober Leads the Top Ten Most Dangerous Viruses in November

Sophos recently published the top ten most dangerous and most active viruses that were spotted online in November. Sadly, the results of this chart aren't very flattering for security experts worldwide as this particular month has seen a record number of malware riding the online waves. This was also a prolific time for one of the Sober variants, Sober-Z having real chances of becoming the number one virus this year.

The report has been put together thanks to the Sophos global network of monitoring stations and it proves that even if Sober-Z was spotted near the end of the month it managed to spread so fast and on a wide scale that it made up for its late entry and in the end accounted for one in every 13 emails sent.

Sober took the Internet by storm and also managed to take the lead of the Sophos virus chart, while Netsky-P, the worm written by convicted German teenager Sven Jaschan, fell to second position after dominating the number one spot for the past four months. The new variant of Sober has been "awarded" with a 42.9% share of all spotted viruses and it spreads as an email attachment. Once installed it attempts to block antivirus software and it scans the computer for email addresses in order to automatically forward itself to the new destination.

The November top virus chart includes three different families, Netsky, Mytob and Zafi, which proves virus authors are still inclined to make new variants of malware that has been around for some time.

The complete top 10 most dangerous viruses in November is the following:

1. Sober-Z
2. NetSky-P
3. Mytob-GH
4. Mytob-EX
5. Zafi-D
6. Mytob-BE
7. Zafi-B
8. Mytob-AS
9. NetSky-D
10. Mytob-C