04November 2003

Malware October summit

October Evil Top Ten from BitDefender

October Evil Top Ten is naught but a collection of midgets and have-beens. Msblast.A is still on top of our top, running strong with twice the number of infected machines it had chalked up last month, but the rest of it is just as peaceful as we like it .

Ranking	Virus Name	Percentage
1.	Win32.Msblast.A	34.2%
2.	Win32.BugBear.B@mm	12.5%
3.	Win32.Swen.A@mm	10%
4.	Win32.Parite.B	8.2%
5.	Win32.HLLP.Hanta.A	7.0%
6.	Win32.HLLW.Agobot.G	7.1%
7.	Win32.Worm.Welchia.A	6.3%
8.	Win32.P2P.Tanked.B	5.2%
9.	JS.Trojan.NoClose.K	4.8%
10.	Win32.Klez.H@mm	4.7%

Although it may seem things have soothed down, there are some signs of fresh viral activity scattered within the last days of October. One of the new viruses discovered last week is Sober.A, which seems to be spreading a great deal and might be worthy of taking into consideration for the next month's ranking. And the statistics strongly indicate this trend: after just a few days in the wild, Sober.A is climbing very fast in the weekly virus top and, more interestingly, the infections ratio is going up higher and higher. On the 31st of October, the number of newly infected systems rose to 48% of the total number of infections reported in the previous four days.

Based on past experiences, we strongly suspect that next month will see a renewed flurry of activity on the virus front, but until then BitDefender prefers to keep its users still interested and perfectly protected.

The report, called the "Evil Top Ten", is based on the number of virus occurrences confirmed through BitDefender Response Team tracking.

Note: BitDefender users were protected since the very beginning against the threats described above. Moreover, BitDefender experts were among the first to release antidote tools, freely available on the Internet.

Commercial versions of BitDefender start from USD 29.99 and are available for 30-days free evaluation from www.bitdefender.com.