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A new computer virus continued to spread on Wednesday but most users in Hong Kong again escaped the worst of it.
Companies and internet service providers worked hard to filter out the tide of junk e-mail created by the Mydoom virus, which surpassed the Sobig.F worm - which struck last August - to become the fastest-spreading virus to date. 
 The virus, also known as Novarg, is disguised as an e-mail error message. When opened on computers running Microsoft Windows, it can send out 100 infected messages in 30 seconds to addresses stored on a computer. 
'We've had reports of mail slowing down, and some cases of mail taking an hour to be delivered,' said Allan Bell, Asia-Pacific marketing director for Network Associates, from Sydney. 'It's obviously clogging the networks out there.' 
'As far as large corporations go, there are no more major cases of outbreak,' he said, adding that small business and personal users were more at risk because they might not be up to date with their ?virus-protection measures. 
Roy Ko Wai-tak, head of the government-funded Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team Co-ordination Centre, said the ?centre received four reports of ?Mydoom infections yesterday, in addition to three on Tuesday. 
Internet traffic rose by  20 to 30 per cent on Tuesday as e-mails created by the virus flew between computers, but traffic levels seemed to be lower yesterday. 
MessageLabs, which scans ?incoming and outgoing e-mail for spam and viruses for clients, said it stopped 1.2 million copies of ?Mydoom within the first 24 hours of the outbreak, with a peak infection rate of one in 12 e-mails. This is higher than the 1 million copies of Sobig.F intercepted in the first 24 hours in August, with a peak infection rate of one in 17 e-mails. 
At the peak of the outbreak, the company was stopping 100,000 copies of the virus each hour but that number fell to 50,000 later in the day.
At 5pm yesterday, Hong Kong had the eighth-highest number of computer infections, MessageLabs said. The US came in first, while Australia and South Korea came third and sixth  respectively. 



Mydoom continues to spread gloom