HostReview Editor's Desk

Virus Threat Increases and SPAM Harm Online Business
by Milena Sotirova July 20, 2004

The first six months of 2004 showed an increase in the number of attacks against online servers, which caused millions of dollars of losses potentially reaching $20.1 million for a global sized company, according to marketing research published in the last week.

The alarming signals for the growing threat are becoming more and more problematic for businesses, since the latest data shows that 48 percent of enterprises will be doing more business over the Internet in distribution and services.

Bagle and Sasser worms are statistically most malicious and their impact on the businesses were the most harmful in the first half of the year. The Bagle worm first appeared in January as an e-mail attachment. Several months later, there were more than 25 variants of the virus, spreading thru the Net.

The mechanism of the Bagle worm is closed in a Trojan that gets information from the victim's PC and can be used to distribute SPAM. W32.Sasser.Worm spreads by scanning the randomly selected IP addresses for vulnerable systems and can reflect in waste a lot of resources so that programs cannot properly run if the system is infected, according to Symantec definition.

According to a report, recently released by Message Labs, three-quarters of European businesses surveyed said they believe viruses will become more dangerous. Near 60% believe the frequency of attacks can increase.

The other threat which is related to the virus malicious attacks - SPAM is measured to harm the businesses effectively, causing security attacks and loses. According to the managed email security services provider , the of the 909 million inbound emails scanned by the MessageLabs Anti-Spam service, 691.5 million were intercepted as spam, equating to a global spam ratio of 1 in every 1.3 emails (76%).

The greatest concern to the online industry remains the growing dependence on the online presence and business activity of the companies, which makes the virus problem a part of the main challenges in surviving of the small business depending on Internet.

According to a survey, most companies kept security functions inside the company, with only 12 percent indicate they consigned 20 percent of security procedures to other companies in the virus protection sphere.