I have received viruses/worms by e-mail in the last seven days. This means that the current virus weather is Sunny. This is a decrease of 1 from the previous seven-day period, when the weather was also Sunny.

This report is generated nightly, and displays the number of each type of virus caught. The grey-blue bars in the background represent the percentage of the all-time total (starting June 1st, 2002), and the smaller, brighter bars represent the percentage in the last seven days. Red means that this virus was received more often than it was in the previous seven-day period, blue means that it has been seen less, and shades of purple are in between.

This is not a generalized picture of the entire Internet's virus situation. It's simply a count of the infected messages which have reached my system and been caught by my scanner (ClamAv). This is almost certainly skewed from the whole-world picture in several ways. Notably, most of my friends are somewhat computer-literate, and so I'm less likely to be hit by the Microsoft Outlook address book scanning worms and trojans. This heavily slants things towards Klez and other more crafty (and more evil) viruses that get their targets in other ways.

Since I'm running Linux both at home and at work, the chances of actually being infected are remote -- there are a few theoretical Linux viruses, but their chances of surviving in the wild are small. The modern virus's favorite ecosystem -- think "open sewers" here -- is Microsoft's desktop environment and Internet tools, and almost everything out there targets that. Technically, many of these are worms and trojans, but the distinction has become increasingly blurred these days.

Until Klez came along, I rarely ever saw a virus-carrying attachments, but now it's become routine, so I thought hey, I'll set up a little page to track things. Note that this isn't an invitation to e-mail me more trojaned attachments -- I get plenty, thanks.