14 DAY TRIAL // The Zafi worm caused email mayhem in December, disguing itself as a Christmas greeting, it managed to infect more than one in every ten emails. That's why it ranked number one in the "Top 10 most dangerous viruses", put together by Sophos. Zafi-D attempted to disable anti-virus and firewall protection software on infected computers and tried to open a backdoor on affected PCs to download further malicious code. However, experts are very surprised to see the worm spread also in January, well passed the Seasons Greetings usual time.
Next on the menu we'll stumble on variants of Netsky (P is #2, D & Z are 5th and 6th, B is #8, and C is 10th), Bagle , MyDoom and Sober.
The second most commonly encountered virus in January, Netsky-P, is still causing considerable trouble. Protection against this worm has been available since March 2004, but there are so many computers poorly protected against viruses that allow this spread to continue.
The top ten viruses in January 2005 were as follows:
Position Last month Virus Percentage of reports
1 1 W32/Zafi-D 44.0% 2 3 W32/Netsky-P 19.4% 3 4 W32/Zafi-B 10.1% 4 2 W32/Sober-I 6.3% 5 5 W32/Netsky-D 3.2% 6 6 W32/Netsky-Z 3.1% 7 7 W32/Bagle-AA 2.1% 8 8 W32/Netsky-B 1.9% 9 10 W32/MyDoom-O 1.2% 10 Re-entry W32/Netsky-C 1.1% Others 7.6%
Sophos analyzed and protected against 1,329 new viruses in January, which leads to a total number of 99,829 that the company offers protection from. Sophos research shows that over 4.3%, or one in 23 emails, circulating during January were viral. This figure is a little lower than last month when 1 in 18 emails were viral.