E-mails offering Viagra via the net
Every person on the net has one thing in common. They all hate spam.

Anyone who has an e-mail account will have received these unsolicited commercial messages that offer you things you do not want, at prices you will not pay, from companies you will never call.

2002 was a bumper year for these messages and now 30% of all mail flying around the net is thought to be spam.

Filtering firm Surf Control has compiled a list of the top 10 most annoying spam messages sent across the net in the last 12 months.

Message overload

Unsurprisingly, top of the list were messages with a sexual theme.

Spam top 10
Free adult site passwords

Low price drugs (Viagra)

Refinance your mortgage

Nigerian confidential money transfer

Tiny remote control car

Best online casino

#1 Pasta pot

Get out of credit card debt

Meet singles in your area

Copy DVDs in one click

The most annoying spam purported to pass on to people free passwords for sex sites that usually levy a charge to look beyond the front page.

Next on the list was a pharmaceutical service offering people the sex drug Viagra.

Also on the list of most annoying spam messages were those asking people to help get money out of various African nations.

These 419 scams as they are called are entirely bogus but regularly catch out gullible net users who let their greed overwhelm their common sense.

Costly business

Surf Control estimates that spam costs businesses around the world about $9billion a year to deal with.

This estimate includes the time it takes people to delete the messages, the cost of buying larger mail servers and storage systems to cope with in-boxes flooded with the messages and the cost of having staff unclog networks overloaded by spam.

There is little sign of an end to unsolicited mail.

Last year, one in 12 e-mails passing through MessageLabs' filter system was identified as spam.

The e-mail filtering company has warned of a dramatic rise in the amount of spam clogging in-boxes

It says the amount of spam will exceed normal e-mails by around July.

By Mark Ward
BBC News Online technology correspondent

If 2001 was the year of the big hitting computer virus, 2002 was the year of the slow burner.
In 2001 viruses such as Code Red and Nimda prompted warnings of internet meltdown and made many local parts of the net unusable for people connected via those links.

The last 12 months may not have had as many headline grabbing viruses, but many of the novel malicious programs debuting in 2002 had significant staying power and rattled around the web for months.

Experts say the year has also shown some worrying trends and emphasised the importance of keeping anti-virus software up to date.

Worm warning

The biggest virus of 2002 was the Windows Klez worm which first appeared in March.

According to figures from anti-virus firm Sophos, the virus accounted for almost a quarter of all the virus reports the company received in 2002.

Virus catching firm MessageLabs said it captured more than 10 million viruses throughout 2002, and almost five million of those were copies of the Klez worm.

The self-spreading worm travels by finding e-mail addresses it finds in Windows Outlook, instant messaging programs or in files on the infected machine.

Klez has been so prolific because it contains its own e-mail engine and the subject line of any infected e-mail is regularly and randomly changed making it hard to warn people about it.

It can also be hard to warn people that they are infected because the virus fakes the address it came from.

Threat analysis

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at anti-virus firm Sophos, said Klez was a good example of the type of program popular with virus writers.

Most active viruses in 2002
W32/Klez.H-mm

W32/Yaha.E-mm

W32/BugBear.A-mm

W95/Klez.E-mm

W32/SirCam.A-mm

W32/Magistr.A-mm

W32/BadTrans.B-mm

W32/BadTrans.B-mm

W32/Hybris.gen-mm

EML/Greeting-Card

Previously virus writers had favoured so-called script virus such as the Love Bug.

By contrast is a Windows 32 executable file. Almost 90% of virus reports in 2002 were about such programs.

Ironically, said Mr Cluley, such viruses are easy to stop with a properly configured e-mail gateway.

This year saw virus writers continuing to use the names of popular woman celebrities to try to make people open an e-mail and unleash its malicious payload.

Colombian popstar Shakira, singer Britney Spears and actress Jennifer Lopez have all been used to name viruses.

Spam attack

The last year also showed a significant rise in the numbers of viruses in circulation as well as the appearance of several hundred new viruses. There are now more than 78,000 known viruses in existence.

When Message Labs started scanning e-mail for viruses it was catching one virus every 60 minutes. In 2001 this leapt to one every 30 seconds. In 2002 the rate hit one every three seconds.

One worrying trend was the emergence of marketing companies that use virus techniques to spread their message.


2002 lacked a headline hitting virus
One of the first to use this technique is Panamanian company Permissioned Media which buries the agreement to let it plunder e-mail address books in the small print of its license agreement.

But, said Mr Cluley, despite these increases there were some encouraging signs for those fighting the spread of these malicious programs.

David L Smith, the writer of the Melissa virus, was finally sentenced and 2002 saw the capture trial and charging of several other virus writers.

This is a trend that Mr Cluley expected to see continue in 2003.

"I'm positive we are going to see more convictions of virus writers," he said.

"We need to get away from the idea that these guys are geniuses," he said, "that is really the wrong message to send to these kids."

"Viruses have real victims, its not just faceless corporations," he said.

By Dominic Bailey
BBC News Online at Southwark Crown Court

The two-year prison sentence handed down to programmer Simon Vallor is expected to hit hard in the bedrooms and studies of computer users around the world.
Vallor was convicted of three counts of releasing a computer virus contrary to section three of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

The "mass mailer" viruses Gokar, Admirer, and RedesiB were received by computers in dozens of countries.

Evidence provided by Scotland Yard, after a tip-off from the FBI, was surprisingly scarce.

One of the detectives who tracked down Vallor to his bedroom in Llandudno, North Wales, said it was "difficult to quantify the damage this kind of virus can do".

The court heard from just one UK-based anti-virus computer company which said Gokar was sent to around 33,000 business and home computers.

Data provided to the police by the company contained only one example of the RedesiB virus and five of the Admirer virus.

Computer security expert Jack Clark of anti-virus company McAfee said Vallor's sentence based on such evidence would send shockwaves around the online community.

"The sentence sends a clear message to users of the internet that if you do like to write codes for the dark side this is what can happen.

I saw this on BBC and I thought I should share it with my fellow TIGers. Of course if you know then ignore.

Shalala - Zambia
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Traffic has slowed dramatically on many parts of the internet - apparently the result of a fast-spreading, virus-like infection, computer experts say.
The electronic attack is reported to have interfered with web browsing and e-mail delivery.

Experts said the attack on Saturday was similar to the impact of the "Code Red" virus, which brought internet traffic to a standstill in the summer of 2001.

"It's not debilitating," said Howard Schmidt, one of President George W Bush's top cyber-security advisers, quoted by the Associated Press news agency.

"Everybody seems to be getting it under control."

South Korea hit

He said the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center and private experts at the CERT Co-ordination Center were monitoring the attacks.

It is highly likely hackers have launched an all-out attack on the country's internet system



South Korean Information Ministry official


In South Korea internet services were shut down nationwide for hours on Saturday, the country's Yonhap news agency reported.

It said the shutdown was triggered by "apparent cyber terror committed by hackers".

It was not immediately clear if the South Korean attack was the same as that reported in the United States.

It is the first time South Korea's wired and mobile internet services have been hit collectively in such a way, according to Yonhap.

But the impact on most financial institutions, corporations and government offices was minimal as they were closed for the weekend, it said.

According to software experts quoted by AP, the attack targeted vulnerable computers, infecting database software from Microsoft Corp., called "SQL Server".

The attacking software code overwhelmed many internet data pipelines as it searched for victim computers randomly and aggressively.

Today I read two emails that made me realise how important language is. They have made my day start on a bad note. I wish we could all be nice to each other in emails but then again, charity begins at home. Some people do not change!