Computer viruses spread by e-mail are growing more sophistic

[CaptinCrunch]

Computer viruses spread by e-mail are growing more sophisticated as virus writers and spammers are thought to be joining forces in an effort to make smarter bugs, a computer security group said Tuesday.

New York-based MessageLabs, which scans client e-mails for viruses to block, said it picked apart some 5.6 billion e-mails from January to June this year and found one in 12 contained some sort of virus that penetrated firewalls meant to block them. MessageLabs typically scans about 50 million customer e-mails daily, and its customers include major government and corporate entities from the British government to The Bank Of New York and Japanese technology giant Fujitsu.

With the recent proliferation of software blocking spam, the spammers are paying virus writers to create viruses that attach to their e-mails and circumvent the spam blockers. MessageLabs said its employees who monitor chat rooms have learned that virus writers and spam writers are increasingly exchanging messages about joining ranks.

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