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Virus Damage Worst on Record for August

Thanks to the havoc that Sobig-F and the Blaster worms wreaked a few weeks ago, August reportedly has gone down as the worst month in digital history for virus attacks. Last month, viruses, along with overt and covert hacker attacks, caused $32.8 billion in economic damages, according to a new report from mi2g, a digital […]

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Sharon Gaudin

Sep 2, 2003

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Thanks to the havoc that Sobig-F and the Blaster worms wreaked a few weeks ago, August

reportedly has gone down as the worst month in digital history for virus attacks.

Last month, viruses, along with overt and covert hacker attacks, caused $32.8 billion in

economic damages, according to a new report from mi2g, a digital risk assessment company

based in London. Mi2g also notes that the Sobig virus alone accounted for $29.7 billion of

economic damages worldwide.

”August damage figures tower well above all previous months since our records began in

1995,” says D.K. Matai, executive chairman of mi2g. ”The whole issue of trustworthy

computing is now at stake.”

Mi2g also reports that Sobig has become the most damaging virus on record, overtaking

malicious rivals Klez, Love Bug and Yaha. The Klez worm has been pushed to second place on

the infamous list, causing $13.9 billion worth of damage. The Love Bug is now in the third

position, accounting for $8.75 billion in damages.

Chris Belthoff, a senior security analyst with Sophos, Inc., an anti-virus company based in

Lynfield, Mass., says August will go down in the record books — just as it will go down in

the memories of the anti-virus experts and IT managers who had to battle the virus onslaught

last month.

”August 2003 will be remembered as one of the worst months in the history of computer

security,” says Belthoff. ”The Sobig-F worm clogged up inboxes and crippled networks with

the sheer volume of email traffic it produced. Users and companies should remain on guard

and put systems in place to protect against future attacks.”

Sobig-F, the latest member of the malicious Sobig virus family, hit the Internet hard,

flooding email servers and inboxes. Corporate networks staggered under the barrage with

network access slowing to a crawl, and some email systems being taken temporarily offline to

stop the siege.

Sobig-F is designed to die out on Sep. 10. That’s leading many analysts to suspect that the

next variant will hit on Sep. 11 or soon after. And if that variant builds on the malicious

success of Sobig-F, then the damage could be even worse.

With all that damage under its belt, it’s no wonder that Sobig-F topped the charts for the

most frequently occurring virus in August, according to both Sophos and Central Command,

Inc., an anti-virus company based in Medina, Ohio.

Sophos has Blaster-A, Nachi-A, Mimail-A and Yaha-P rounding out the top five viruses.

Central Command lists them as Blaster-A, MiMail-A, Nachi-A and Klez-E.

”The month of August turned into a plague of Internet worms affecting computer users

worldwide,” says Steven Sundermeier, vice president of products and services at Central

Command. ”

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SG

Sharon Gaudin

Sharon Gaudin is a veteran technology journalist who has worked for the likes of Computerworld, InformationWeek, and Datamation. She has covered everything from the cloud, security, and social networking to software development, robotics, artificial intelligence, and hardware.

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