It seems that much of the increase in traffic is due to a war between rival virus writers. Bagle.J, Bagle.K, Netsky.F and Mydoom.G all contain comments in the binary code that is found within the files of the virus, according to Sophus PLC, an antivirus company. These comments are aimed at the rival authors and contain foul language, bad spelling and good old fashioned insults.

Panda Software has published a time-line of the recent events to help the end users understand the severity of the situation. This should be a good read for all of us by the time this article appears since March 11th has been declared “the skynet day” by the author or authors of Netsky.K. Skynet Antivirus is referred to in many of the messages talking about the writers of Netsky.

It seems that the exchanges started in January when a version of Netsky began removing the Mydoom and Bagle viruses from machines that it infected. The barbs have continued and even escalated to the point of almost daily updates of the viruses being released. Most of the new versions are said to be for the sole purpose of continuing the exchange of insults between the authors.

All three of these viruses spread in e-mail messages with vague sounding subject lines to try to get you to open the attachments that come with them. Do not be fooled by the simple messages that might seem like a real e-mail. If you open the files and are not protected sufficiently, you will become infected and start to infect others.

The viruses carry their own e-mail sending engines, which means that they do not need your e-mail account to send out infected e-mails from your system. They look through the different drives on the infected system for e-mail addresses to send themselves to. Then when they send themselves out to try to infect other machines they will use one of the e-mail addresses that it finds as the from address. This is why you may recognize the name of the person that is supposedly sending the virus. If your e-mail address is found on an infected system then there is a chance that you will know someone else who is listed there.

There are more problems that are created other that just being infected and infecting other users. The Bagle and Mydoom worms also use code to open ports on your system that can then be used to send spam e-mail through your machine, send harmful instructions to your computer or install software to spy on you and any other users of the infected machine. One more reason to get you anti virus software installed correctly and set to update automatically on a daily basis. I would suggest that you set them to check for updates at 8 pm. This would give the antivirus companies time to make the updates available and allow your system to update since there seems to be a lot more activity during the evening and early morning.

We have about 30 e-mail addresses at our company. I wanted to get some idea of how many viruses are actually flowing around out there so I took a look at the log file on our e-mail server. There were over 1000 messages that were deleted in a 2 minute period because they were infected with a virus. I understand that this is in the middle of a very serious outbreak but the numbers are overwhelming. That is a lot of e-mail coming to one server that is doing no good to anyone. If we as a company did not have any protection there is no end to the number of machines that we could infect before our own systems were crippled and could not function anymore.

There is not much good that can come out of a virus outbreak like this. The only positive that I can see is the addition of the verbal sparring that is going on between the authors. The sparring has been going on between hackers and virus authors since their beginning. Hopefully with the increase in messages within the viruses they will send some clues that will lead to their arrest and conviction. The only problem with this thought process is that the ones that get caught are not the ones that need to be caught the most. The ones that don’t get caught would have to be the smarter ones of the bunch and thus the ones that do the most damage. Life is not fair but such is the rule of survival of the fittest. Last one standing wins.