The UK is continuing to bear the brunt of the Bugbear virus, so far
suffering more than 183,000 occurrences.
The VirusEye monitoring service run by security firm MessageLabs
said the UK has been hit the hardest.
On Monday afternoon (7 October) MessageLabs reported that its virus
scanning service had stopped more than 321,00 occurrences of the
Bugbear virus worldwide. Some 183,667 of these were in the UK,
20,618 were in Australia and just 20,021 in the USA.
Reacting to the impact of Bugbear, Mark Sunner, chief technology
officer at MessageLabs, said: "There have been few new viruses in
2002 although levels of virus activity have never been
higher."
Bugbear, which originated in Malaysia, has been disrupting e-mail
users since 29 September. The virus replicates by attaching itself
to a copy of the body text from legitimate e-mail messages in a
user's inbox.
