COMPUTERS Viruses continue to infect

DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
NEW YORK -- A virus that debuted this week has been declared the fastest spreading e-mail plague of all time, while another malicious program that hit last week continued to disrupt computers worldwide.
MessageLabs Inc., a company that filters e-mail for corporate clients around the world, said Wednesday it had intercepted more than a million copies of the "Sobig.F" virus the previous day, the most it has ever intercepted in a single day. That was one in every 17 e-mail messages the firm scanned.
"That's just a number we've never seen before," said Brian Czarny, MessageLabs' marketing director. The most widespread virus of all time, "Klez," at its peak accounted for one in 125 messages scanned.
Sobig.F continued to spread aggressively Wednesday, though the pace eased off a bit to about one in 60 messages, he said.
The virus, which is the sixth and latest strain of a virus that first emerged in January, spreads through Windows PCs via e-mail and corporate networks. Besides clogging e-mail systems with messages carrying subject lines such as "Re: Details" and "Re: Wicked screensaver," the virus also deposits a Trojan horse, or hacker back door, that can be used to turn victims' PCs into relayers of spam e-mail.
Another virus, of the self-spreading kind called a "worm," first appeared last week and was still causing problems Wednesday. The worm, dubbed "Blaster," spreads through Internet connections to PCs using versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system that haven't been fixed for a programming flaw. Microsoft disclosed the error, and provided a patch, July 16.