Sophos unveils top-10 malware list for February

Boston (MA) - Mytob, Netsky, and the notorious HckPk were among the largest malware threats during February, according to Sophos’s monthly report.

Sophos, an IT security company, said that the biggest problem last month was HckPk, a group of various programs, most of which use encryption tools to go undetected and can easily plant malicious code to an unexpecting PC user.

According to Sophos, HckPk malware accounted for 50.3% of all malware threats in February. Next on the list was Netsky, accounting for 15.1% of all threats. The Netsky family of worms and viruses has have a wide range of effects, from triggering beeping soungs on the computer to causing continuous PC crashes.

Mytob was right behind Netsky, taking credit for 12.5% of February’s threats. The Mytob family is notorious for causing computers to continously restart themselves, spreading itself through huge networks even if just one computer is affected. One variant, Rbot, is the infamous worm that affected CNN’s computers and put the news network at a standstill for several hours in 2005.

Other malware making it to the top 10 list for February were Zafi (4.8%), Sality (3.8%), MyDoom (3%), and Bagle (2.4%). Clagger, Nyxem, and StraDI took the #8, #9, and #10 positions, respectively, each with less than 2% of all malware threats last month.

According to Sophos, about one out of every 256 e-mails were infected with malware in February. A total of 7757 new threats were found by Sophos last month.