new mitglieder variant overtakes Sober as top threat?

I'm confused (yeah - I know...) - when I read articles such as this from normally fairly "trusted" sources...

"Mitglieder overtakes Sober as biggest virus threat": http://www.vnunet.com/2146781

Then I look at VirusRadar.com: http://www.virusradar.com/

and (at the time of posting) - Sober.Y shows 262,000+ threats on VR, and the next nearest threat in terms of numbers is Netsky.Q at 7,400 - how does Panda (or any other source), see such a VASTLY different picture?

I know what virusradar.com bases it's figures on, but does anyone have any info on how the "others" determine their figures for making such announcements? From what I see at virusradar, it would be hard pushed to overtake Sober.Y... unless you're VERY close to the source...

 

It is because VirusRadar gets it's numbers from an email provider in Czech. So it only shows a small part of the world. Panda gets it's numbers from it's ActiveScan site. So you have to use AS in order for Panda to tabulate the numbers. In this case I would think Eset reflects more accurate numbers although it is possible that a bunch of people don't have any AV and went to Panda's site and inflated their numbers a bit.

 

"inflated their numbers a bit" - a bit?

 

Even in the worldwide statistics gathered from NOD32 users there is no Mitglieder in top 10:

01. Win32/Sober.Y worm
02. Win32/Bagle.DR worm
03. Win32/Netsky.Q worm
04. probably unknown NewHeur_PE virus
05. Win32/Adware.Gator application
06. Win32/TrojanDownloader.Ani.gen trojan
07. Java/ClassLoader.B trojan
08. Java/TrojanDownloader.OpenConnection
09. Java/TrojanDownloader.OpenConnection.AJ
10. Java/ClassLoader.H trojan

 

I know Marcos, which makes me wonder just where the source for this information is... but I found this...

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/trojan.mitglieder.c.html

Is it a dropper?