SoBig Not Gone Yet
Like Ben and J. Lo, the SoBig.F virus long ago overstayed its welcome and seems to be intent on hanging around to annoy as many people as possible. But, unlike Bennifer, the virus mercifully is set to expire on Wednesday, providing worm-weary administrators and users with a bit of relief.

The original SoBig virus appeared in early January, welcoming workers back from the holidays with a raft of infected messages from big@boss.com. In the intervening eight months, five more variants have been set loose, with varying degrees of success.

But none of the previous versions even remotely approached the infection rates that SoBig.F has achieved.

The latest iteration of the virus hit the Internet on Aug. 18 and spawned more than a million copies of itself in the first 24 hours of its existence. At its peak later that week, one in every 17 pieces of e-mail inspected by e-mail security provider MessageLabs Inc. was infected with SoBig.F. Since then, the infection rate has slowed, but MessageLabs continues to stop as many as 600,000 copies of the virus each day.

The respite from SoBig may be short-lived however, as many anti-virus experts expect another variant to be released soon after this one expires. There is some debate in the community on this point, as well as the question of whether all of the previous versions of SoBig have been created by one person. But if history is any guide, it won't be long before another variant is flooding inboxes with maddening levels of junk.…

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1252887,00.asp