Viruses dip slightly in January

The number of email viruses doing the rounds has dropped fractionally, while spam still accounts for almost 90 per cent of traffic, experts say.

January statistics show that viruses now account for 0.5 per cent of total email traffic while spam accounts for 87.09 per cent.

According to security experts, the majority of the new viruses are trojans, designed to make it for hackers to steal financial information.

Bo Engelbrechtsen, corporate communications manager of email security company SoftScan, said: “Although the continuing trend of a decrease in viruses is good news, I don’t think we’re witnessing the demise of email borne viruses and users should still be on alert.

“I think it is more likely that the trend of a targeted approach to virus infection that we saw emerge last year will continue to develop in 2006,” he added.