The week before HIMSS I was at a client site when I got hit with an email virus. A thoughtful gentleman with a new market research report was sure I'd be interested in his email and attachments - totaling 1 MB. I received 135 of his missives the first day. I've received echos of this initial onslaught every day since, and it seems I'm not alone.
Security company Commtouch provides statistics on software virus and spam proliferation world wide. According to them, January was particularly bad:
The numbers are indeed concerning: 19 new
email-born significant virus attacks, of which a troubling 8 (42%) were
graded "low intensity", 7 (37%) "Medium Intensity" and 4 (21%) were
massive attacks – a rare phenomenon for a single month.
One outbreak of specific interest, consisting of 7 variants,
illustrates how viruses are growing in sophistication: the first
variant was launched around December 25th as a low intensity virus,
however with subsequently released variants the attack's intensity grew
into a massive outbreak towards the end of the month.
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