Top prevalent malware threats

Anti-virus vendor Sophos has revealed that the Netsky-P worm, first seen in March 2004, remains the most widespread piece of malware travelling via email around the world.

The Sophos report, compiled in July, found that the actual proportion of infected email has dropped to a low of one in 222 (0.45 percent), compared with the first six months of 2006 when, on average, one in 91 emails (1.1 percent) carried malicious attachments.

Sophos identified 3715 new threats in July, bringing the total of malware protected against to 184,007. The majority of the new threats (87 percent) were Trojan horses, while just 13 percent were worms or viruses.

The top ten list of malware in July 2006 reads as follows; Netsky-P at 19.3 percent, Mytob-AS, 13.9 percent, Bagle-Zip 9.7 percent, Nyxem-D 6.3 percent, MyDoom at 6.0 percent, Zafi-B 4.2 percent, Netsky-D 4.0 percent, Mytob-C 3.6, Mytob-FO 1.7 percent, MyDoom-AJ 1.7 percent and 29.6 percent accounted for other viruses.

According to Sophos, the dramatic reduction in viral email traffic indicates that malware authors are looking for other methods of infection.