What is the worst virus possible on a computer and what are the effects?
Sobig-F, which ran rampant across the Internet in August and early September, has gone down in the history books as the most damaging virus to date. It reportedly caused $36.1 billion in damages. At this point, MessageLabs, an anti-virus company based in New York, has intercepted 737,125 copies of Sobig in 183 countries. At its peak, one in every 17 emails stopped by MessageLabs contained a copy of Sobig-F, the most malicious of the variants. By Dec. 1, more than 32 million emails containing the virus had been stopped by the company, easily putting Sobig-F at the head of various Top 10 Viruses list for 2003. During Sobig-F’s rampage across the Internet, AOL saw email traffic nearly quadruple, according to an earlier interview with Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesman. Graham says AOL scans email attachments at the gateway, checking for viruses. On an average day, the ISP scans approximately 11 million attachments. One day during the Sobig-F attack, the staff scanned 40.5 million email att
