In November a detailed report accused a Russian spamming expert of spawning Sobig, but he denied it.
This reputation has been mauled in the past few months by computer worms and viruses, such as Sobig.
The first version of Sobig prompted infected computers to download Trojans that had been invisibly parked at Geocities, Yahoo's free Web-hosting service.
Security experts believe that Bagle is modelled on the notorious Sobig series of viruses as it bears many similarities with those malicious programs.
As the Sobig threat eased, a new profit-driven virus appeared:Mimail, which crashed machines and directly asked users to type in their credit card numbers.
By the time the good guys had shut down Web sites hosting Sobig's malicious code at Geocities, Sobig already had gone through a sixth version.
Digital detectives who have tracked Sobig's origins now describe an elaborate criminal enterprise in which code-writers issued steadily improving versions, each one harder to kill than its predecessor.
Digital detectives who have tracked Sobig's origins now describe an elaborate criminal enterprise in which code writers issued steadily improving versions, each one harder to kill than its predecessor.
"There was little financial loss" from the last round of Sobig "because the places where it was logging to were disabled, " says Martin Lindner of the Computer Emergency Readiness Team at Carnegie Mellon.
Sobig likely arose from programmers in Russia who wanted to make a tool that would gather passwords and account numbers, while also letting spammers take control of other machines and use them to spew out millions of junk messages anonymously.
The first signs that the computer virus was becoming a business tool for online criminals can be traced to Sobig, which, at its peak in August 2003, was contained in 1 of every 17 e-mail messages coursing around the Internet.
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