CyberSecurity Institute

Viruses were found in 11.99pc of messages circulating in Ireland last month, a significant rise on the rate of 7.39pc in January.

As with January, variants of the Zafi worm were the two most frequently occurring infections last month. In February their influence was somewhat reduced; Zafi.D was found in 41.12pc of infected emails and Zafi.B occurred in 21.16pc of cases.

The IFrame styled viruses takes advantage of a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that allows a malicious HTML document such as an email message to execute automatically when it is viewed through the browser. It also affects Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, which share similar code for previewing HTML formatted messages. This helps the virus to spread as users don’t even have to click on the attachment to launch the virus – it could be spread simply by opening the infected message in Outlook’s preview pane.

“This is the first time in memory that a specific HTML exploit has come up so prevalently, normally they only occur in ones and twos,” he said. Driscoll pointed out that the vulnerability in Internet Explorer that IFrame exploits was identified almost four years ago, which means its presence suggests that large numbers of home users still have unsecured systems.

“This is an education issue that doesn’t seem to be reaching some people,” he said.

IE Internet also released figures, which showed the incidence of spam rose slightly to 38.1pc last month, a marginal increase from the level of 36.68pc recorded in January.

As ever, the US is the largest single source of unsolicited commercial email, although South Korea is gaining ground and now accounts for 17.85pc of emails sent to Ireland.

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Antivirus software company Sophos said that Zafi-D, which first appeared at the end of 2004, has been the most regularly spotted malware, followed by Netsky P.

Sophos noted that February’s top 10 is dominated by old viruses, with only two new entries this month, Bagle-BK and Sober-K.

“It looks like the Zafi-D worm is going to be hanging around like a bored teenager for some time to come, unless more home users realise how important it is to update their antivirus software. This Hungarian worm accounts for almost one in three viruses reported,” said Carole Theriault, security consultant at Sophos.

Theriault predicted that the Sober-K worm will be one to watch in March. “It can pose in a number of disguises, including a bogus bogus email from the FBI or raunchy videos of celebrity heiress Paris Hilton,” she said. One in 23 emails circulating last month carried viruses, according to Sophos.

Kaspersky Labs added that the number of malware detected overall in February “in absolute terms was low enough to make this month the quietest for the past 12 months”.

But the company warned that the detection of six new Bagle variants today is likely to have an impact. “We will undoubtedly see some of them in the March top 20. We will undoubtedly see a new crop of Trojan-Proxy.Win32.Mitglierder in the next few days, since this is the Trojan that Bagle typically downloads. We should then see a burst of spammer activity and new phishing emails,” the antivirus company said.

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