10 most dangerous virus in 2004 2 replies

Anti-virus specialist Panda Software has named the Downloader.GK Trojan as the virus that caused the most amount of damage to computers across the world in 2004.

Downloader.GK is a virus that infects machines when unsuspecting users visit certain web pages and accidentally instal an ActiveX control, which in turn secretly runs two adware programmes on the computers it infects.

Experts say that the threat from these viruses will continue to cause major headaches for people in this 2005 too.

More than 14 per cent of all attacks on computers detected by Panda's ActiveScan were due to Downloader.GK.

The top ten threats identified by Panda include:

• 1. Downloader.GK (14 per cent)
• 2. Netsky.P (6.92 per cent)
• 3. Sasser.ftp (4.97 per cent)
• 4. Gaobot.gen (4.31 per cent)
• 5. Mhtredir.gen (4.22 per cent)
• 6. Netsky.D (3.98 per cent)
• 7. Downloader.L (3.56 per cent)
• 8. Qhost.gen (3.48 per cent)
• 9. Netsky.B (3.45 per cent)
• 10. StartPage.FH (3.34 per cent)

Three of the Top Ten ranking are members of the Netsky family, (the P,B and D variants). The three share a number of characteristics, and as with many worms, they all spread via e-mail in messages with variable characteristics.

was your computer infected by anyone of those . mine was with netsky.b :(

The only one I have actually heard of is the Sasser worm. I must have good protection as I have never had any of them.

Also - It seemed that I had got the Sasser Worm Security update from Windows Update about a month before anyone knew about it. That means there was a cure for it months before anyone actually got it. Weird.

We had Netsky.B at work. It has dire consequences on a large, but slow network.