Viruses downloaded during our p2p study

One question we have been asked was about the type of viruses that we found in the document files that we downloaded during our P2P study (see here: http://jamia.bmj.com/content/17/2/148.short?q=w_jamia_current_tab). The purpose of our study was not to examine the types of viruses that were being disseminated through file sharing, therefore we did not collect extensive information on this. However, we did make a number of observations:

• Viruses can be embedded within Microsoft Word documents as executables. When you open the word document and double click on the executable image you would then run the virus.
• The most common virus we found was the Vundo trojan. There are multiple variants of this and the severity of the infection will depend on the variant. You can find more here: http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_127690.htm and http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx?md5=19fc1e2e258763d5c149f7b195689cdb.
  

Note, however, that we only downloaded document files. There may be other types of viruses that are disseminated through other file types.

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