Viral attacks plague business

Anti-virus company Sophos warns that increased network breaches are threatening companies on the internet.

Computer viruses are currently one of the biggest dangers to face network managers in the UK, and the problem is only going to get worse.

This was the stark warning issued by computer virus expert, Jan Hruska, technical director for anti-virus company Sophos.

He blamed increasing pressure to connect to the internet for rapidly decreasing companies' control over what data enters their networks. This uncertainty raises the potential for a malicious code to penetrate even the best-protected environments.

"The virus writing underworld seems determined to cause as much trouble as they can and are using the internet to its maximum potential to help spread the work while not exposing themselves to any danger of being caught," he said. "Anti-virus companies are finding it more and more difficult to keep up the research effort and in the last year some have consolidated or even abandoned their efforts."

Hruska highlighted the destructive capacity of a new breed of recently discovered killer viruses. He cited CIH - the first virus to damage computer hardware - as a clear sign that virus writers have reached new and more dangerous dimensions.

"The CIH sourcecode is widely available on the net, so it is only a matter of time before similar routines appear in other viruses," he said.

He also warned of a trend towards incorporating increasingly powerful application macro languages into software: "The software manufacturers reason that supplying the macro capability makes applications more flexible, easy to customise and easy to use. This is true, unfortunately it also makes them less virus-proof."

According to Sophos, the virus which caused most damage during this October was the Excel/Laroux macro virus, which accounted for 22.8 per cent of all reports.