During February, Kaspersky lab issued three virus alerts with a 'medium' threat rating. All these alerts were because of the rapid spread of new Zhelatin variants in mail traffic.
Obviously, these outbreaks have had an effect on the February Virus Top Twenty: out of the nine new malicious programs, six of them are Zhelatin variants. Storm worm and more.
Here is the February Virus Top 20 :
The struggle between Zhelatin and Bagle.gt resulted in a veteran worm, Netsky.t, taking first place, while Bagle.gt dropped back to second position. Zhelatin, meanwhile, managed by weight of numbers to occupy four of the top ten places.
When a new leader heads the rankings, there's usually a general shake-up, with new programs making their first appearance, and old viruses making a comeback. As noted above, there are nine new malicious programs in the February Top Twenty, and four re-entries, including some old friends such as Nyxem.e, Scano.gen and Netsky.b. This demonstrates once again that today's email worms have a long lifespan, and may be found in traffic years after their first appearance.
Other malicious programs made up a significant percentage (12.86%) of all malicious code found in mail traffic, indicating that a considerable number of other worms and Trojans are currently actively circulating.
In last month’s Top Twenty, we noted that Warezov worms had been almost totally beaten back by Bagle. Only a single Warezov variant remained in January's Top Twenty, and Bagle.gt led the rankings. However, the world of computer viruses takes after nature, in that it abhors a vacuum, and as usually, new and more dangerous malicious programs have come to fill the void. This was the case in February, when we witnessed several epidemics caused by a new family of worms: Zhelatin.
Zhelatin is the ‘storm worm’ that got such wide coverage in the mass media at the beginning of the year. The worm spreads as emails with a range of topics designed to pique the recipient's curiosity - the terrible hurricane in Western Europe, the death of President Putin, and the resurrection of Saddam Hussein.
Although Zhelatin was initially thought to be a new Warezov variant, closer analysis revealed a new family of malicious programs which probably originated in Asia.
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