Thousands of idiots still infected by SirCam

Still the most common mass mailing virus

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Anti-Virus, 2nd October 2001 16:31 GMT

The Nimda worm might be the worst virus at the desktop level but SirCam continues to be the most widely circulated email-borne virus.

That's the conclusion we draw from September statistics on viruses blocked by MessageLabs, a managed service provider that scans its users email for viruses.

MessageLabs blocked 143,949 emails containing SirCam, originating from 18,700 different email addresses, (belonging to individuals whose service should be suspended by ISPs until they clean their act up, we reckon).

The next most common virus, Magistr.A, was only filtered out by MessageLabs 23,295 times, while the much publicised Nimda worm was blocked 1,683 times (indicating the most problematic aspect of the worm is its ability to infect, and scan for, vulnerable servers).

Alex Shipp, senior antivirus technologist at MessageLabs, said that Nimda only just scrapped in at number 10 its chart, whereas the Love Bug reached the heights of number seven, thanks to only 25 security-adverse plague spreaders. By contrast, antivirus vendor Sophos reports that Nimda was the biggest irritant for its clients last month.

MessageLabs' list considers the actual number of viruses blocked during a month, unlike the monthly study by anti-virus vendor Sophos, which only looks at calls to its support centre (an inferior metric). That said, Sophos will pick up on incidents of file infecting viruses, such as the destructive FunLove pathogen, which normally aren't spread by email. ®