Press release December 18, 2002

Bugbear prevents the installation of Norton Antivirus 2003
Viruses in email attachments are on the advance

It looks like the Bugbear virus has another nasty surprise in store. In the antivirus newsgroup fido.ger.virus a user wrote how he tried in vain to install Norton Antivirus 2003. When he started the program on his computer, the Norton user interface appeared for a few seconds and then disappeared again. This way he was unable to protect his computer.

The reason for this was that he had a Bugbear virus on his computer. It does not allow the installation of the protection program and prevents that Norton checks files and drives for viruses. Bugbear deactivates all known protection programs like for example virus scanners and personal firewalls.

MessageLabs experts found that in 2002 one in every 212 emails contained a virus. Last year the ratio of harmless emails to mails containing dangerous code was still 380:1, in the year before 790:1. In plain numbers this is a total of 9.3 million emails that were identified to be infected with a virus by Messagelabs alone.

As Mark Sunner, chief technology officer at MessageLabs, says: "Email security must remain a high priority. … With virus writers and spammers becoming more sophisticated by the day, proactive protection is more crucial now than ever before."

The SaferSurf.com service provides a different kind of virus protection. Every file that comes from the internet and every email attachment is scanned on its way to the computer. Infected files are eliminated before they can reach the user computer. The SaferSurf virus scanners are maintained by security experts and updated every few minutes.

When the new Bugbear virus turned up, all SaferSurf users were protected automatically within just 10 minutes. Not a single SaferSurf user computer was infected with the Bugbear. The spread of the virus was stopped without a user having to download an update for their anti-virus program.