The Sober-I worm variant was the main newcomer on November`s global virus charts, despite the fact that it contains a major flaw and only surfaced towards the end of the month.
While variants of the Netsky, MyDoom and Bagle worms remained the most prevalent in November, anti-virus vendors say the Sober.I worm is the noteworthy inclusion.
According to Netxactics CEO Brett Myroff, the variant - which surfaced on 19 November - was the second most prevalent virus on its charts for the past month, accounting for 20% of all reports.
"The worm spreads by e-mail and uses a variety of subject lines and message texts, many of which allude to important security or messaging information," says Myroff.
"This type of ruse often outwits users, who double-click on the attachment to learn about the problem. Instead of discovering more about the bogus issue, unprotected users are infecting their computers."
In its November virus charts, anti-virus vendor Kaspersky Lab said the worm caused a "brief epidemic", but faded quickly due to faults in its coding. These errors were present when Sober first appeared at the end of 2003 and cause the worm to send meaningless data by e-mail.
Phishing appears to be on the rise, with Kaspersky identifying more than 40 attacks during November. Many of these were almost candidates for the top 20 in terms of volume, even though they are only sent once, in contrast to a worm which sends out millions of copies of itself.
This is disturbing as it means that phishing attacks are now almost comparable in scale to worm epidemics, the company said.
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