The last 5-6 weeks we have seen an increase of viruses blocked by the SpamDrain filter. The virus proportion has raised to levels around 2 – 3 %. This doesn’t sound much but compare this 0.2 -1 % for previous weeks. Two per cent corresponds to 15,000 viruses per week for our customers only. Since the spam proportion is around 80 % it means that for every tenth valid message there is a virus e-mail. Imagine the damage all these viruses could have made.

On the second place in our virus top list on the first page you currently find the Suspect.Bredozip virus. This is actually not a virus but an encrypted zip file. However, this is a very popular way to send viruses nowadays since virus filters is not able to decrypt the file in order to scan it for viruses. Normal users don’t send each other encrypted zip files and therefore it’s safe to block them as viruses.

Furthermore we see that Trojans dominates the list. Not suprised about this actually. Everytime we help people with infected computers there are trojans or rootkits involved – feasting on the computer resources. To sum up; I thought e-mail viruses were almost extinct, but as you see our statistics show that they are very much alive.