Incidents of email-borne viruses were markedly down last month but old favourites like SirCam and BadTrans-B are refusing to die a decent death.

That's according to monthly statistics from managed services firm MessageLabs, which stopped 135,523 viruses in February, compared to 241,609 in January and almost 480,000 last December. MessageLabs reports that virus infection rates are running at less than one in 1,000 emails, compared to one in 30 infected emails at the heights of the Goner or Love Bug epidemics.

In the last four weeks MessageLabs blocked 36,693 emails infected with SirCam. BadTrans-B, with 18,707 infection-bearing emails stopped, and MyParty (16,047) also feature prominently.

A monthly chart (http://www.kasperskylabs.com/news.html?id=327561) of virus reports compiled by antivirus vendor Kaspersky Labs tells a slightly different story. Badtrans-B, SirCam and the Hybris worm feature prominently in its chart, but the runaway leader is the Klez worm, which accounted for almost two in three (61.5 per cent) of calls to Kaspersky Labs' support centre. ®

Top ten viruses blocked by MessageLabs in February

1. 
   
2. SirCam
   
3. BadTrans-B
   
4. Magistr-B
   
5. Klez-E
   
6. Hydris-B
   
7. Magistr-A
   
8. Goner-A
   
9. Gokar-A
   
10. Hybris-D
    
11. Kak-A
    

External links

Latest monthly stats from MessageLabs (http://www.messagelabs.com/viruseye/default.asp?by=month)
Kaspersky Labs virus top twenty for February 2002 (http://www.kasperskylabs.com/news.html?id=327561)

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