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Klez-H hangs around like a bad smell

Odious worm top viral charts, again

Klez, yet again, was the mostly reported viral menace on the Internet this month.

Managed services firm Messagelabs has blocked Klez-H 387,026 times this month. The virus accounted for 15.3 per cent of support calls to AV firm Sophos.

March marks the fourteenth month on the trot that Klez-H has appeared in Sophos' top ten chart.

"Klez continues to hang around like a bad smell - those hit by it couldn't have updated their anti-virus protection in more than a year. Now that it's possible to receive fully automated updates, there's really no excuse", said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant, Sophos Anti-Virus.

"Although it's easy to protect against Klez, it's a seriously nasty virus to recover from," he added.

MessageLabs reports that one in 270 emails it processed this month contained a virus, around average during a month where vulnerabilities - rather than viruses - have posed the greater security headache.

Although the Iraq war (AKA Ganda-A) virus and Bibrog-B virus, which poses as a computer game, dominated the headlines, older viruses dominate both the Sophos and MessageLabs charts.

Neither chart has changed significantly from last month.

Panic Attack

Sophos also charts calls to its support centre which turn out be hoaxes.

In this category, the WTC Survivor hoax - which falsely warns of a September 11th-themed virus - has taken the number slot for the first time in a year.

Hoaxes clog mail servers and cause much unnecessary confusion so the advice is to get informed (using sites like VMyths.com) and to be suspicious of warnings urging recipients to "tell everyone they know".

You know it makes sense. ®

Top ten viruses blocked by MessageLabs in March


  1. Klez-H
  2. Sobig-A
  3. Yaha-K!e2a2
  4. Yaha-E
  5. SirCam-A
  6. LoveGate-F (new entry)
  7. BugBear-A
  8. Yaha-C
  9. Yaha-P
  10. Naith-A

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