Sasser update: Home users right in the firing line

As many as 80 per cent of those infected by the Sasser virus were home users and students, according to antivirus firm McAfee.

That poses a much greater problem than compromised corporate computers, in terms of internet safety, said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of Network Associates' McAfee Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team.

"The problem is that most of those infections are not going away any time soon," said Gullotto. "Those people don't generally know what to do."

The Sasser worm is estimated to have as many as one million systems, according to security experts. Nearly 1.5 million customers visited Microsoft.com and used the Sasser scanning and cleaning tool in the first 48 hours of its availability, the software giant said Tuesday. The number is not a reliable measure of infection, because many of those users may not have been compromised by Sasser, a company representative said.

Robert Lemos writes for News.com