While antivirus vendors have reported several new viruses and malicious attackers in the past week, we have not seen any new large scale outbreaks. However, the ghosts of virus past are still with us—Klez, Blaster, Swen, Bugbear, Dumaru, Mimail, and WelchiaNachi all haunt the top ten. According to virus analysts, the WelchiaNachi worm has only another week or so to live, as it is supposed to remove itself in 2004. Despite this fact, it is still infecting at a good rate, so we are featuring it in our top threat this week..
2003 may go down in history as the year of the spammer, as there has been more spam sent and received than in any other year.eWEEK reported Monday Dec. 15th that a judge in California ruled to allow pop up spammers to continue to operate for the time being. One spammer, in particular, was sending Windows Messenger Service popups to PCs that were not running a firewall or had the service turned on (its on by default in Windows XP/2000). The ruling may trigger more spammers to try their hand at that kind of advertising. If youre being plagued by these pop-ups, check our tip from Nov. 11th.