Nimda worms its way to top of September virus chart

Sircam slumps

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Security, 1st October 2001 11:52 GMT

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The Nimda worm was the most infectious computer virus last month, according to the number of calls logged by anti-virus vendor Sophos.

The prolific worm, which spreads via email or by scanning and uploading itself onto vulnerable Web servers (among other methods), accounted for 71.1 per cent of calls to Sophos' support centre in September. It was followed by SirCam (11.4 per cent), the chart topper in July and August, and various forms of Magistr (6.6 per cent) in incidents of reports.

Peter Cooper, UK support manager at Sophos Anti-Virus, said the Nimda worm highlighted the need to keep operating system fully patched and updated, as well as AV protection up to date, in order to keep the spread of malicious code under control.

Fears that the weekend could see a fresh outbreak in Nimda infections, because its email component was due to reactivate on Friday (spewing out a fresh batch of virus-laced emails from infected machines), have thankfully failed to materialise.

Sophos said it found 890 new viruses during September 2001 which is down slightly on August's figure of 1 051. ®

Top ten viruses reported to Sophos in September