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Ukraine: losses from viruses surge

Date: August 02, 2004
Source: Computer Crime Research Center
By: Ludmila Goroshko

According to the Ukrainian Antivirus Center, losses from virus attacks added up to 45m EURO for the first six months of 2004. As compared to the previous year, losses are up 30 per cent over the first half of 2003.

The biggest damage per one PC falls to the share of the average business, where companies have numbers of computers and minimum information security budgets. Most of huge Ukrainian companies began to pay more attention to the antivirus protection after the last year's epidemics. These efforts helped them out to minimize their losses this year.

Besides, attacks related to home users significantly increased for this period. For instance, more than 90% of Ukrtelecom ISP users were affected by virus attacks for the first six months of 2004. The main cause of global virus epidemics in this segment is that they have almost no means of antiviral protection and network firewalls.

The biggest damage was incurred by worms: where mail worms I-Worm.MyDoom (Novarg), I-Worm.NetSky (NoDoom), I-Worm.Bagle and also network worms Worm.MSBlast and Worm.Sasser were the absolute leaders.

Trojan programs ranked second by size of caused damage. Backdoor.Agobot with more than 300 variants is an undoubted leader in this category. These trojans possess splendid variety of malicious functions including different methods of information theft, resistance to antiviral software and network screens. Besides, Backdoor.Agobot can spread itself over the local networks.

Backdoor.Hacdef is a kind of trojan that incurred the biggest financial damage for the first half-year in Ukraine particularly. Backdoor.Hacdef is one of the most spread viruses at the moment. These viruses have a unique technology to receive remote commands; therein they can overcome protection of network firewalls and obtain confidential information.

Trojan.Win32.Agent is another trojan which is utilized to get classified data. These trojans are wide spread all over the world, including Ukraine.

UAC experts note that increase in PCs' number, bandwidths' capacity leads to ever-increasing scaled virus epidemics and accordingly losses caused by them.


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2004-08-03 10:33:24 - what is the procedure for me to take to... bobby sutton
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