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Systemhouse along with other e-security companies issued a warning over a new virus called "MyParty." Technically My Party is classified as a mass e-mail worm, and according to Systemhouse it first appeared on Sunday night in the US.
Symantec has given the worm a "Level 3" rating and McAfee/Dr. Solomon as well as Trend Micro call it a medium risk. All three companies have updates and patches available for the bug at their respective Web sites.
The worm arrives as an e-mail with the subject line, "new photos from my party!" The e-mail also carries an attachment, which appears to be a Web site link, and is titled www.myparty.yahoo.com. This apparent link carries the worm itself and clicking on it executes the programme. Although the bug seems to cause little damage to users' PCs, it is capable of resending itself to other users through Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail programmes.
According to a new study it is likely that the new worm came from one of 10 countries where 70 percent of attacks are based. Of these 10 nations the United States tops the list of homes for malicious computer attacks, according to Virginia-based Riptech. The e-security company released a report on Monday which said more cyber attacks originate in the United States than in any other country, with the US hosting 30 percent of all computer attacks, three times more than South Korea, in the number two spot with nine percent.
However that survey also showed that the average user in Israel is more like to be an attacker than in the United States.
The Riptech study did not include Code Red and Nimda, worms which accounted for 63 percent of the malicious activity detected by Riptech, as their high occurrence would have skewed the study's results.
Behind the United States in percentage of total attacks were South Korea, China, Germany, France, Canada, Taiwan, Italy, Great Britain and Japan. However, only around 3.5 attacks were made per 10,000 US Internet users, compared with 26 attacks per 10,000 Internet users in Israel, the study found. Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, France, Turkey, Malaysia, Poland, Taiwan and Denmark followed Israel in terms of per capita frequency.
Despite the growing occurrence of computer viruses released into the wild, Riptech said more worrisome were the direct attacks aimed at compromising a specific company's computer systems. Thirty-nine percent of attacks detected by Riptech appeared to be deliberate attempts to compromise a specific system or company, the report said.
"I think this is the most amazing statistic," Tim Belcher, chief technology officer with Riptech, told ElectricNews.Net. "After working in the industry for over 10 years I would have guessed that opportunistic attacks would be between 80 and 90 percent, but they are much lower. This suggests that the attacks are far more dangerous than we had previously expected," he added.
According to Riptech, high-tech, financial services, media and power and energy companies showed the highest intensity of attacks per company, each averaging more than 700 attacks over a six-month period.
"Power and energy companies were targeted in inappropriately high amounts by Middle Eastern countries," said Belcher. "With the results of this survey, small energy companies that don't do any business in the Middle East could just block users from that region from accessing their networks."
Riptech said its findings strongly suggest that "once companies connect their systems to the Internet, they are virtually guaranteed to suffer some form of attack." Over the six-month period in which the survey was conducted, average attacks per company increased by nearly 80 percent.
Riptech investigated more than 128,000 computer attacks found in the analysis of 5.5 billion log entries and alerts on its customers' networks between July and December.
More information is at http://www.riptech.com.
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