Brian Clarke fired up his laptop Thursday and got buried in an avalanche of 414 e-mail messages–most of them generated by this week’s latest computer virus, the “Sobig” worm.
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“This has just been the biggest pain in the world,” said Clarke, who travels the Mid-Atlantic region representing the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity on university campuses. “I like using e-mail, but this makes it ridiculous.”
So, how big is Sobig?
Since Monday, the virus has sent itself millions of times over as an attachment to e-mails with subject lines such as “Details,” “Wicked screensaver” and “That movie.” Some e-mail providers catch them, and some don’t.
America Online on Thursday matched Wednesday’s record, when 23 million copies of the virus were blocked before they reached AOL users’ e-mail boxes, spokes-man Nicholas Graham said.
“This is the most aggressive” virus, Jimmy Kuo, of the McAfee Security Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team, said Thursday. “This is truly way, way up there,” he said. And email-security company MessageLabs Inc. proclaimed Sobig the “fastest growing virus ever” in the gallery of online pestilences that includes the infamous LoveBug, Klez and Kournikova viruses, and last week’s biggie, the Blaster worm.
Because corporate networks were more likely to have anti-virus hardware and software in use, three home PCs were being infected for every business computer that got the virus, according to McAfee.
Junk e-mail, including unsolicited “spam” and virus-generated messages, are taking a rising toll on worker productivity, some experts say. Ferris Research, a marketing and technology research firm in San Francisco, said earlier this year that junk e-mail will cost American companies $10 billion in 2003. But in light of proliferating viruses such as Sobig, “the $10-billion figure is actually very conservative,” David Ferris said Thursday.
McAfee said 49 percent of Americans spend more than 40 minutes per week deleting spam, with 14 percent reporting they spend as much as three and a half hours a week–or 7.5 days per year–on this task.