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SirCam tops July virus charts

One in 10 PCs have the pox

The privacy-threatening, bandwidth-stealing SirCam worm topped the Virus charts in June.

Sircam accounted for a whopping 65.2 per cent of calls to the support centre of antivirus vendor Sophos. It was followed by Magistr (10.4 per cent), last month's chart topper, and Hybris (4.1 per cent).

Sophos found 1276 new viruses during July 2001 but the emergence of SirCam swamped all before it.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, expressed concern that such a high-profile virus is still spreading, even to the extent of infecting computers at the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Centre.

He advised users to update their antiviral protection and apply "safe computing guidelines". In other words don't open suspect attachments, if you want to avoid infection from SirCam.

This is an old message but bears repeating, especially when figures from rival antivirus vendor McAfee are taken into account.

In the last week of July, SirCam had infected 12 per cent of PCs scanned in North America and 11 per cent of European machines checked using McAfee's online scanning service. ®

Top ten viruses reported to Sophos in July


  1. Sircam
  2. Magistr
  3. Hybris
  4. Badtrans
  5. Apology
  6. Kakworm
  7. Keylog Trojan
  8. HHold
  9. Flcss
  10. Qaz


External links

Top ten viruses reported to Sophos in July 2001

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