Fizzer, which spectacularly failed to live up to its name on Monday, has been upgraded to a Level 3 -- on a 5-level scale -- threat by Symantec Security, based on the large number of infections worldwide. MessageLabs, which provides an e-mail management service, has stopped almost 30,000 e-mails containing the virus from the Asia-Pacific region alone.
The chief anti-virus expert for the company said the length of time that elapsed between the worm's emergence and the commencement of its spread indicated a lack of urgency by anti-virus companies and others involved in the protection of computers from infection. "The worm came out last Wednesday and didn't take off until Monday," Alex Shipp, chief anti-virus technologist for MessageLabs told ZDNet Australia . "There was a four-day window where something could have been done, but wasn't".
Shipp acknowledged that the worm's rapid spread indicated a breakdown in corporate virus prevention policies, as it used social engineering techniques to propagate.
Eugene Kaspersky, head of anti-virus Research at Kaspersky Labs, said in a statement that this fact was "particularly surprising".
"It had seemed such primitive methods of social engineering were already well-known to users and had faded into the past," he said. "Taking this into account, we consider it necessary, once again, to remind users of two fundamental rules of computer hygiene: to regularly update anti-virus program databases and to always check all incoming data, especially e-mail."
The Fizzer worm is expensive to eradicate because it shuts down antivirus programs. This means a special program is required to clean all infected machines. The removal program is available free from most anti-virus sites -- with the expense being incurred in the labour required.
How about the sloppy coding that left the door open in the first place???