Seemingly, one in every 22 emails moving around cyberspace right now is infected with the latest version of the Sober worm. Research from UK antivirus company Sophos has made the claim that this mass-mailing worm is so huge that it now accounts for about 79 per cent of all viruses the company is seeing. Recently, we reported that the worm was getting spread by means of an e-mail offering free tickets to the 2006 World Cup. Using the kinds of technologies employed to send out spam, Sober spreading e-mails are apparently all over the place.
"It's still very widespread. It appears to turn off Symantec's antivirus protection and the Windows XP firewall. It seems to do that to set up future attacks." - Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.