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Zafi.b originated in Hungary, but quickly spread, possibly due to its cunning ability to use 18 languages, depending on the IP address of the recipient.

It accounted for 30 per cent of reports to Sophos and nearly 34 per cent of infections detected by Kaspersky.

Otherwise, the remainder of the chart is dominated by Netsky variants, peppered with appearances from Sasser, Bagle

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and Sober.

Kaspersky's Denis Zenkin Head of Corporate Communications said that 'June 2004 has probably turned out to be the quietest month this year... maybe virus writers have been lying low due to arrests of coders worldwide or maybe antivirus vendors have succeeded in clearing up the aftermath of previous outbreaks.'

However Zenkin warned that while the upper echelons of the virus charts have seen little change, there have still been significant numbers of new viruses detected: nearly 300. Sophos says it has analysed 677 new viruses in June.

Zenkin says that many of these are adopting the model of Sasser and exploiting open ports and vulnerabilities in software to spread across the Internet automatically, rather than rely on an email carrier and a recipient dumb enough to launch an attachment.

Still, Zafi.b's pole position this month is evidence enough that there are still plenty of easily duped people out there who will do such a thing.