s because it was the first exploit that mass mailed itself from a victims computer to everyone in that users address book. When the virus arrived in an unsuspecting persons inbox, it would appear to be from a person whom the potential victim knew. A simple subject line; An important message from , where was the name of the person who's computer sent the infectious message, was all that was needed to entice the victim to open the attachment. Of course today it would take a little more ingenuity to entice most people into falling for this sort of trap. And most of us have learned not to trust attachments that we are not absolutely sure of. As reported in USA Today 8/01/2001, it was estimated to cost $1 billion to clean up, which pales in comparison to the reported estimate by Lloyds of London, that the Love Bug virus a year later cost $15 billion. The reason the Love Bug virus was so successful was because it did not rely on the user to open an attachment. It took advantage of a flaw in Microsoft's Outlook preview pane feature. Most people who use Outlook would use the preview pane to read messages without taking the extra step to open the message. Although Microsoft had offered a patch for this particular flaw more than a year earlier, it became evident that most users, and even IT administrators hadn't been keeping up with the security patches. Now the most recent virus to make the news, Sobigf, has found another way to thwart the anti-virus measures. Sobigf is another variation of the previous Sobig virus with different lines of program code to avoid being detected by the anti-virus programs. This virus has the ability to spoof the senders email address when it mass mails itself from a victims address book, as well as any other common source of email addresses may find on the local computer. This makes it very difficult to trace where the actual virus is originating. Adding to the network congesti...