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Kaspersky Top 20 For December
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-01-03
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Moscow-based Kaspersky released their top 20 viruses for the month of December. Interestingly enough, the list was pretty much entirely worms for them and Mytob seemed to be the most common threat.
Topping the charts this month was the old favorite, Zafi.d, climbing two positions from the previous month. The Zafi.d has been out over 18 months and occupied nearly 30% of the total virus take so to speak. Next on the list was Mytob.c. Variants on Mytob dominated the charts this month with variants occupying literally a full half of the 20. Those variants included a, bk, the aforementioned c, dx, h, q, t, u, w, x, y.
Also making the lucky list were Lovegate, Netsky, Sober, Bayfraud and Bagle. Kaspersky pointed out December saw a lot of activity regarding viruses. One point of interest the disappearance of the Doombot family, which many expected to overtake the Mytob group of viruses. One thing Kaspersky points out is the apparent resilience of some these veteran virus grou;s like Mytob and LovGate, which, even after several years, continue to float around in the top 20.
To sum up, the top five includes 2 worms from the Zafi family, one Mytob, one Sober and one LovGate. Apart from Mytob.c, there's no sign of Mytob's previous domination among the leaders. In spite of the fact that 10 Mytob variants remain in the Top Twenty, it seems likely that soon they will be edged out by the new worms, which will start to appear in 2006.
13th place in our Top Twenty is highly significant, as it's occupied not by a worm, not by a virus, but by an email! Trojan-Spy.HTML.Bayfraud.hn is one of the many hundreds of phishing emails, which were sent to eBay users in December 2005. A figure of 1.36% of all virus traffic is very respectable, and shows that phishing is not going to disappear from the cyber threat horizon, but is continuing to evolve, and will remain a major security problem in 2006.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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