Part of the motivation for the name calling may be the fact that some editions of Netsky, particularly Netsky.d, seek out and destroy some editions of the Bagle worm it finds on infected systems.
The ultimate losers of any hacker cat fight are end users, said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of McAfee's AVERT virus research team. "It's the end user, it's the Internet that suffers," he said. While some mail servers have been temporarily clogged, the Web as a whole hasn't been affected by any performance degradation with the millions of worm-laden messages shunting back and forth. But it gives users -- both corporate and consumer -- fits trying to stay updated against such fast-developing, high-volume threats, and the Internet a black eye.
"In my seven years, I've seen this back-and-forth once or twice or three times, but nothing to this extent," said Gullotto. "There's new variant after new variant, two and three times a day in some cases."
In the last 24 hours, a quartet of new worms or variations on older editions have been spotted by McAfee, said Gullotto, including MyDoom.g, Netsky.f, Bagle.k, and Hiton. Currently, McAfee ranks them all as a "low" threat, while rival Symantec tagged the four with a "2" in its 1 through 5 scale.
The most persistent, and prevalent, of the worms released since Friday remains Netsky.d, which first appeared Monday.
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