Despite being touted as a potential disaster, the heavily hyped worm attack anticipated on February 3 did not materialise with any real force.
The destructive payload capability worm, which came under various names and guises such as Kama Sutra, Nyxem, MyWife, Blackmal and Grew, was designed to begin overwriting and deleting files on the day in question, with the virus reported to have infected more than 300,000 machines since its discovery on January 16.
Figures are not yet available for how many stations were actually hit, but security firms that IT Weekly spoke to last week agreed the actual damage had proved to be quite light.
“We didn’t see a great deal [of damage] at all,” said Justin Doo, managing director for Trend Micro MEA. “If anything it was more overshadowed by the new version of Bagle that was spotted the day after,” he added.
During the 19-day interim period between discovery and de- adline, anti-virus and mail-filtering firms around the world set about catching variants of the bug. The UAE, with 3%, ranked sixth among the top ten nations affected by the worm in a list released before February 3.
Opinion over whether the alarm surrounding the Kama Sutra worm helped avert a disaster for PC users was mixed.
“Unless people are pre-warned about potential problems, and what the impact could be, there is no means for them to proactively respond to those cases,” noted Ivor Rankin, senior manager for technical consulting, Symantec EMEA.
“On the other hand, if companies had not taken a proactive stance and advised or alerted people about the possible dangers, then they would probably be accused of not doing enough to actually help people,” he said.
But a lot of the smaller niche players did hype February 3 really well and ‘got more mileage out of it than was necessary’, Doo claimed. However he did concede that for security companies balancing between a proper warning and over-hyping threats could be a ‘fine line’.
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