Klez-H enjoying its final days on infamy?

The nasty BugBear worm made a race for infamy at the end of the month, but that old favourite Klez-H still made it to the top of the virus charts last month

That's according to monthly statistics from managed services firm MessageLabs, which stopped 576,100 copies of the viruses in September. It's the fifth month in a row Klez-H has topped the chart.

MessageLabs reports that virus infection rates are running at around one per 200 emails, compared to one in 30 infected emails at the heights of the Goner and Love Bug epidemics.

In September MessageLabs blocked 255,656 emails infected with Yaha-E. SirCam, with 25,690 infection-bearing emails stopped, and Klez-E (6,950) also feature prominently in the managed services firm's monthly stats.

A monthly chart of virus reports compiled by antivirus vendor Sophos tells a similar story. A couple of JavaScript nasties (ExceptFam and NoClose feature prominently in its chart, but the clear leader is the Klez-H worm, which accounted for one in five (20.4 per cent) of calls to Sophos' support centre.

BugBear failed to chart, but since its discovery last weekend MessageLabs has blocked over 34,000 copies of the varmint.

The appearance of BugBear, which among its nasty tricks plants a Trojan and a key logger on victim's PCs might be a blessing in disguise, however. A theory popular at Virus Bulleting conference in New Orleans last week was that after a quiet year a major virus scare might be the only thing that'd encourage home users in particular to update their protection. This, it was argued, might curtail the spread of Klez-H, incidents of which have been growing steadily for months but never enough to force Harry Homeowner into action.

We're not sure if we agree with this theory but now would certainly be a good time for home users to update their protection. Since there's several free consumer AV packages available on the Net, there's really no good reason for failing to act.

You know it makes sense... ®

Top ten viruses blocked by MessageLabs in September

1. 
   
2. Klez-H
   
3. Yaha-E
   
4. SirCam-A
   
5. Klez-E
   
6. Magistr-B
   
7. Yaha-C
   
8. Hybris-B
   
9. Magistr-A
   
10. Nimda-A
    
11. LoveLetter-A
    

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