Computer bugs, continued to slow down company computers and stayed one step ahead of anti-virus software

Finnish software security firm F-Secure said Wednesday, that the Computer worms that have brought down systems around the world.

Mikko Hypponen said, “There emerge to be three different virus-writing gangs spinning out new worms at an alarming rate, as if they were challenging to construct the biggest network of infected machines.”

Hypponen said in a declaration that varieties of three worms — “Zotob,” “Bozori” and “IRCbot” — were still exploiting a gap in Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 2000 operating system on computers that had not had the error repaired and were not protected by firewalls.

The worms were responsible for major system mess at some media outlets and companies in the United States, causing personal computers to resume repeatedly and potentially making them susceptible to assault.

At least six new variants of the virus hit the Web yesterday after the virus was unleashed on Sunday, said Fred Rica, a partner at the computer and information security group at Price Waterhouse Coopers in Manhattan.

Several companies hit by the Zotob virus continued to show significant slowdowns on their Web sites, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif., company that monitors Internet performance of sites.

Despite the propagation at individual companies, the Internet as a whole wasn’t significantly affected, according to Keynote.

But once the worm hit a company, it spread quickly within the corporate network, experts said.

That’s because the virus could connect to as many as 200 computers in a network simultaneously, helping the virus metastasize quickly throughout a company’s network, said Nick Bilogorskiy, manager of anti-virus escalation at Fortinet, a computer security company in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Microsoft and the top computer security companies, Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc said harm to systems on Tuesday had been limited and was unlikely to cause widespread disorder like that which resulted from other malicious software such as “SQL Slammer” and “MyDoom.”