Irish web hoster IE Internet has reported a surge in the number of viruses its email filters picked up in the month of August. The rate of infection for the last summer month stood at 15.15%, compared to 13.90% in July. This breaks a strong downwards trend reported by IE Internet in the past months, when May saw the highest share of messages carrying viruses for the year so far, with 21.72%. Since then both June and July figures reported sizeable drops.

In terms of names, the top-5 Irish virus hit list for August 2006 contains all the usual suspects of the last few years: the top virus by far (with a 40.52% share) is Win32.Mytob.cq, followed in second place with 31.90% by I-Worm.Zafi.b, which first made the rounds more than two years ago. The other well-known virus in the top-5 for August is Netsky with two variants: Netsky.p and Netsky.ap. Interestingly, there is not much correlation with virus figures from Kaspersky Lab for the same month of August, with Zafi not present at all in the Kaspersky Top Twenty.

However, Irish users at least had some respite in terms of spam levels: the rate of spam detected by IE Internet has gone down by nearly four points to 47.90% from 51.60% in July. This is significantly below the 55.13% percent registered in April, the worse month for spam so far this year in Ireland. The biggest source of spam for Irish users was the US, with Korea in a distant second (31.13% and 10.81%). Interestingly, although China has been catching the US up in the spam origin stakes, users in Ireland see relatively little unwanted email from the Asian country, which accounts for only 5.17% of the total level.

▪