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Slammer fails to make January AV charts

AV software isn't cure for prolific worm

The Slammer worm fails to make it into the monthly charts of AV firms this month - despite becoming arguably the most damaging Internet worm ever.

The Avril worm topped the list of calls to antivirus firm Sophos, while email filtering firm MessageLabs again reports that Klez-H topped its nuisance list. The company blocked Klez-H more than 550,000 times over the last four weeks.

The non-appearance of Slammer of either chart is easily explained: AV software and services has a limited role in blocking Slammer. Slammer, a memory resident virus, needs to be combated with a combination of filtering the malicious traffic the worm generates and patching vulnerable boxes running vulnerable versions of SQL Server and MSDE.

AV software doesn't have much of a role here, despite the numerous alerts by firms in the sector over the last week... ®

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