Focus On: Viruses

Savor the traditions of Christmas: Christmas trees, stockings hung by the chimney with care, jolly old St. Nick, devastating worms lurking in emailed Christmas greetings. The only change from season to season is the name of the worm. This year's star is Zafi.D. Nonetheless, the anti-virus community is impressed. F-Secure: "We think this worm will be big, because of its timing and the fact that it comes in 15 different European languages." The worm just showed up on Panda Software's radar yesterday. Panda claims it's "already the most frequently detected virus around the globe, mainly in South America and Europe, where the most affected countries are Italy, Spain, Bulgaria and Hungary." trimMail ...

As its first birthday approaches, the love-child of Sony and Bertelsmann lies gasping on its deathbed. Email Battles tracks Sony BMG honcho Andrew Lack's comments, and concludes that the death was pre-ordained by a poor venture structure and management hubris.

Compared to November, you might say October was a big month for svelte email viruses. The average virus crossing trimMail gateways weighed just 47 KB. While that's quite a bit heavier than August at 39 KB, it's nothing when matched to the average virus size we've seen thus far this month.

RoadRunner has begun virus-scanning outbound email attachments, but it's still passing them on after scrubbing. What's with that?

Clam Antivirus project founder Tomasz Kojm bluntly describes ClamAV response time, competitiveness, longevity and viability on servers as well as desktop systems with Email Battles correspondent Aaron Gillette. Kojm also discusses his research on advanced heuristics that will intercept unknown viruses for which no virus-signatures yet exist.