Storm Worm Capable of Serious Disease for Computers

Computer users encountered a twist in the 2007 National Football League season when they received ad e-mails offering priceless "online game trackers" and links leading to a formal-looking Website flagging the NFL logo.

When fans attempted to download the application from the fake Website, they unwittingly installed the malicious Storm worm on their computers and infected their machines. The worm has been remarkably resilient despite alerts being posted ten months ago.

Once the worm is installed, it adds the unsuspecting user's computer to a botnet of infected PCs, which obeys remote instruction to scatter the worm, cripple Websites, or push out a large number of spam mails promoting pharmaceuticals, stock scams etc. All this happens while the user remains unaware, the Toronto Star reported.

The cyber fraudsters could also use the software to deliver advanced programs to PCs to tap keystrokes and grab users' sensitive information relating to online bank accounts such as username and password; personal information on tax systems; and other confidential information placed on the hard drive, said Dean Turner, Director of Global Intelligence Network at Symantec Corp. MarketDay reported this on October 15, 2007.

The stolen data is usually transmitted to the main server from where they are traded off to other criminals without leaving any trace, Turner said.

The Storm worm is a unique piece of malware not because it creates headlines, but because it makes its authors wealthy by surreptitiously taking over others' computers and then their users' personal information for misappropriation, the newspaper said.

In another tactic recently, Internet spammers are taking advantage of YouTube's "Invite Your Friends" service to spam out e-mails containing a Storm worm variant.

The malware uses much more advanced techniques compared to past trojans and worms making it an extremely sophisticated program. Meanwhile, it is not quite clear for what purpose the botnet would be put to although one thing is certain that the purpose would be far from good.

Since the botnet is highly decentralized, there could be 1-50 Million hosts, estimated on the basis of the number of infected computers. The exact figure is, however, very difficult to tell.

Related article: Storm Worm Returns with Follow-Up Attack

» SPAMfighter News - 11/1/2007