/ 18 February 2004

Bagle.B internet worm third worst to date

The Bagle.B Internet worm on Wednesday continued to propagate itself throughout the world, with experts ranking the virus as the third most dangerous computer bug to date after the notorious Sobig.F and Mydoom.A.

”This is a very serious worm, it’s spread itself quite rapidly, but it will probably not reach the same catastrophic proportions as Mydoom.A and Sobig.F,” said Snorre Fagerland, with Norwegian Internet security company Norman.

”On the scale of the most dangerous viruses, it gets a third place,” he added.

According to United States-based e-mail security firm MessageLabs, Bagle.B had been found in 66 countries by early Wednesday and reached an infection rate of one in every 16 e-mails.

Most affected was the US, where 16% of the infected e-mails were found, closely followed by the United Kingdom with 14% and Germany with 10%, it said.

While Bagle.B continued to proliferate on Wednesday experts estimated that the outbreak would fizzle out soon, well before the bug’s programmed expiration date of February 25.

”It’s still spreading fairly rapidly, it’s a big case, but the technical features of the virus are not that special,” said Mikael Albrecht, of the Finnish Internet Security F-Secure.

”As soon as most people have updated their anti-virus protection, it will die out,” he noted.

The Bagle.B was initially spread from Poland and Germany on Tuesday afternoon, and propagated itself throughout Europe and the Americas overnight, but Asia seemed to have largely escaped the outbreak, experts noted.

The first variant of the Bagle bug was found on January 18, and both bugs are believed to be linked to spammers — senders of unsolicited bulk e-mail advertisements — as they retrieve e-mail addresses from the infected computers. — Sapa-AFP