Viruses wreaked havoc on at least 1 million personal computers
during the weeklong National Day holiday, according to Jiangmin Co,
a leading Chinese antivirus company.
The company's monitoring system detected that more than 118,000
computers crashed on October 6 alone.
"Viruses have been extremely active during the long vacation
because more people chose to stay at home and surf the Internet,
shopping online or playing online games," He Gongdao, an antivirus
expert at Jiangmin, said yesterday.
"More than 24,000 types of viruses were detected during the
week," he said.
He said computer users should be more aware of viruses that
could be passed on through movable disks.
Another antivirus company, Kingsoft, alerted the online
community to a new virus it dubbed the "ultimate killer to
antivirus software".
The virus, a kind of Trojan, is capable of hijacking all kinds
of antivirus software when it successfully attacks a computer.
"It will also automatically search the keywords, including
'antivirus, Kingsoft and Kaspersky', and coercively close the
programs, Li Tiejun, an antivirus software engineer of Kingsoft,
said.
"The virus has been supported and spread by a group of people
who have developed a systematic and standardized business operation
to make profit," Li said. Virus controllers could detect the IP
addresses of each computer, he added.
The new virus, which affected about 40,000 computers a day, will
remain a critical threat to many computer users even after the
holiday, Li said.
According to the latest survey conducted by the Ministry of
Public Security, China has encountered a rising Internet security
problem over the past three years, mainly triggered by a growing
number of profit-driven computer virus writers, hackers and illegal
traders.
Some 65.7 percent of 15,000 companies polled had suffered
Internet security problems from May last year to May this year,
11.7 percentage points higher than before.
(China Daily October 9, 2007)
