A new MyDoom variant may have hogged the headlines for a short while but Netsky remained the top dog on the cyberbug block during July, according to e-mail security company Postini – the fifth straight month the Netsky bug family held the top threat position, with a reported 42.4 million files detected.
For all the attention MyDoom.o garnered in July, the MyDoom family itself placed fifth on the Postini detection count for the month, with almost 3 million detected files. Zafi placed second (16.8 million), Mime third (15.3 million), and Bagle fourth (5.6 million), the company findings showed, with Lovegate (1.7 million), Objectdata (649,029), Klez (634,867), Dumaru (526,734), and Ebscam (471,386) finishing the top ten.
Postini product marketing director Andrew Lochart said announcing the findings that the company’s own programs processed over 5.6 billion messages and stopped over 88.5 million virus files during July.
"The July outbreak of mydoom.o was yet another reminder that spammers are now using sophisticated, blended threats that mix spam, viruses and denial of service attacks," said Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing at Postini. "Just having a spam content filter is inadequate today. Companies must defend themselves with email intrusion prevention systems that prevent these attacks in real time, before they ever reach the corporate network."
Postini also said spam accounted for about 75 percent of all e-mail the company processed that month, down a point from the June processing, and that their customers were protected from more than 16 million directory harvest attacks – bids by spammers to hijack and steal small business and corporate e-mail lists.
