What we re seeing today is a huge infection rate relative to years ago, says Keith Peer, CEO and president of Central Command, a security software company based in Medina, Ohio. Code Red infected up to 300,000 computers in a 12-hour period, according to one published report. Malicious software now can infect up to half a million computers in a single day, Peer says. MessageLabs, a British anti-virus firm with U.S. offices in the Twin Cities, says it has seen a fivefold increase in the number of viruses trying to penetrate its security since January 2000. The numbers rose to one virus for every 200 messages in August, says Andy Faris, president of the U.S. operations.
Potential victims remain vulnerable because they don t take appropriate precautions, experts say.
But that never happens. Code Red isn t the only threat lying in wait. SirCam has been a major headache because of its ability to disguise itself. Such worms carry essentially the same message and subject line as they propagate themselves via victims e-mail address books. Subject lines change because the virus chooses a file at random from an infected computer s My Documents folder, then uses a subject heading identical to the file name.