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Storm Worm Overwhelmed in February 2007

The "Storm Worm" has spiked to the highest point in malware charts for February, as per findings of Fortinet, security-appliance vendor, and according to Itpro's publication on March 1, 2007.

The worm officially named W32/Tibs.gen was spotted the fourth most times among other items of malware and estimated 3.91%, revealed the security firm. The other malware more prevalent was phishing e-mails. The worm has some serious variations that make it more troublesome than dangerous.

Guillaume Lovet - team leader for threat response at Fortinet said that the "Storm Worm" had at least 36 variants. All were active in February of which one accounted for almost 75% of total related detections. Itpro published Lovet's statement.

The "Storm Worm" overwhelmed with accompanied consequences. It was to generate & distribute huge volumes of spam. However, the fight against the spam is neither over not lost, Lovet said. Another notable outcome of the worm is the escalating spam mails' volume since the start of 2007, Lovet added.

At the time the "Storm Worm" was circulating in the wild, another worm called "Stration" also spread. Both were solely designed for creating large botnets essentially to operate from a centralized control. Stration cast its net on small-sized, conventional IRC botnets whereas Tibs would specify in peer-to-peer botnet.

A diminishing number of the infected PCs would help to tackle the menace of spam at least down from the level it prevails today, divulged Lovet. Here the issue is that the infected PCs are growing in numbers everyday.

The original wave of Storm Worm came through targeted e-mails that exploited stories of winter storms that hit Europe in late 2006 and early 2007. The rage with which it came aptly names the Storm Worm thus. It made news by harming millions of PCs and users around the world. When a recipient of the worm-laden e-mail clicked on the link it would download the malicious code and infect his or her system. In this way numerous other computers got compromised. All those compromised PCs would turn into zombies. Attackers promptly used those zombies for sending out bulk advertising e-mails or launch denial-of-service attacks.

Related article: Storm Worm Returns with Follow-Up Attack

» SPAMfighter News - 3/17/2007

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