NetSky still dominates virus hit parade
Its accused maker may be awaiting trial in Germany, but the NetSky virus is still dominating the virus hit parade in May.
Variants of NetSky occupy seven — or perhaps eight — of the "Dirty Dozen" top viruses compiled monthly by anti-virus experts at the Ohio-based computer security company Central Command.
The No. 1 virus on the list is Sasser, which accounted for almost half of all infections reported to Central Command. But the 18-year-old German accused of creating the NetSky virus has reportedly confessed to making Sasser too.
Already, NetSky's dominance is being threatened by a new worm, called Korgo. This week, security experts at Symantec upgraded Korgo (officially named W32.Korgo.F) from a Level 2 to a Level 3 threat after an increased number of submissions.
The highest threat rating given by Symantec is Level 4.
The Korgo worm attempts to propagate by exploiting a Microsoft Windows vulnerability publicly announced on April 13 called the LSASS Buffer Overrun Vulnerability. A blended threat — meaning it does several different tasks — Korgo affects computers running Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems, listening in on TCP ports 113 and 3067, potentially opening back doors on those ports.
