McAfee: No viruses reported during holidays

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by Joris Evers

(IDG) -- At least one anti-virus software vendor said on Tuesday that the holiday viruses it warned about did not show up. Santa left the nasty gifts with his elves.

Because many businesses were closed between Christmas and New Year, viruses could have struck as offices went back online this morning. Nothing has happened so far, however.

"There was absolutely no outbreak of viruses this morning. We did not get any problem reports at all from Europe or Asia. I expect it to stay quiet," said Marius van Oers, virus research engineer at McAfee, a division of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Network Associates.

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Looking back, Van Oers said this year's holiday season is much like last year's. It was predicted that the date changeover to 2000 would entice virus makers to create programs that would execute midnight on Dec. 31, 1999. And like this season, silence ruled.

McAfee was one of the anti-virus vendors that warned against holiday virus appearances this year. The company issued a news release in late December saying that more than 1,000 users had been affected by "holiday-oriented viruses." McAfee "cautioned" that several of the viruses were designed to hide and then affect computers on or around Christmas day.

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"You can see this as a proactive warning, the chance of anything actually happening is pretty slim. If we don't put out warnings and a virus does hit our customers will be indignant," Van Oers said.

The U.S. National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) on Dec. 29 warned against DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks. This kind of attack can paralyze a Web site by flooding the server with information requests.

"There were no DDOS attacks either," Van Oers said, adding that it was expected there would be more DDOS attacks than virus trouble.

DDOS attacks are staged with the use of many computers connected to the Internet. Hackers hijack computers by sending a Trojan horse program. Anti-virus software can intercept such programs.

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Sophos ranks year's ten most troubling viruses
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McAfee

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