The S version has all the chances of becoming the virus with the fastest spreading

May 4, 2005 13:23 GMT  ·  By

The new version of the Sober worm, dubbed Sober.S or Sober P, has all the chances of setting a new record (in a negative way that is). Although the virus was detected Monday, Sophos declares that in this moment Sober is responsible for 77% of the world wide virus traffic.

Sober, which spreads as a message in English and German promising tickets to the World Cup 2006, has all the chances of becoming the most dangerous virus of 2005.

The title of the most dangerous virus was previously owned by NetSky, with 22% of the total virus traffic in 2004.

Kaspersky also confirmed the fast spreading rate of the virus, which was classified as epidemic.

Although numerous alerts about Sober have been published, it seems users are more interested in winning a free ticket to the World Cup than the security of their own system.

Anyway, the likelihood of this spreading method to be adopted by other viruses is very high, so users should pay more attention to the attachments they open.

Besides a series of e-mails, the message also contained a phone number and TrendMicro experts were amazed how many phone calls have been received, proving that a large number of users have credited the message as being real.