January 4, 2007
That e-card in your inbox, wishing you a Happy New Year, is most likely a computer virus.
IT security firm Sophos, says the Dref-V mass-mailing worm, which poses as a New Year e-card, was discovered on December 30, 2006, and by the following day accounted for 93.7% of infected emails.
As a result, Dref -- which was first seen in July 2005 -- has knocked last month's main offender Stratio (also known as Stration) off the top of the chart. Stratio, currently in fourth place, now accounts for just 7.8% of the total.
The figures, compiled from Sophos's global network of monitoring stations, show that the long-established Dref malware has made an unexpected return to the top of the threat chart, thanks to two new variants currently causing problems for computer users worldwide. The new variant disables a computer's anti virus protection and sends itself to email addresses found on the infected computer.
"Dref has been spammed out far and wide in the last few days, and there's a danger that in the rush to get through the backlog of holiday emails, people might return to work and accidentally launch the malicious attachment," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos.
"Its social engineering tactics are not new, so most businesses should have adequate defenses in place to tackle the worm. Having spread for only two days during the entire month, it is astonishing that Dref has secured the top position for most widespread piece of malicious code."
The proportion of infected email continues to remain low, at just one in 337 (0.30%), while during December Sophos identified 6,251 new threats, bringing the total number of malware protected against to 207,684.
