Storm Worm Loosing Charm

The Storm worm is on the wane, according to Brandon Enright, a researcher at University of California. As a result, the Storm botnet is steadily shrinking, the researcher said. Slashdot published this on October 21, 2007.

Some estimates suggest that the Storm botnet has about 50 Million computers that could empower its controller more processing capability than the most high-powered supercomputers in the world. According to Enright, in July, the Storm compromised about 1.5 Million PCs, of which around 200,000 were accessible to the attackers at any point in time.

The researcher feared that the Storm had been able to infect around 15 Million computers during its nine-month stay on the Internet, although a huge number of those computers have been ridden of the worm and have ceased to belong to the Storm botnet.

This year (2007) on September 11, Microsoft added a detection feature for Storm to its Malicious Software Removal Tool that comes with Windows software. Microsoft has named the Storm components as Win32/Nuwar. The tool found Storm infections to drop and by an additional 20%.

On October 21 2007, the Storm network shrunk to nearly one-tenth its original size, Enright said in a statement that PCWorld published. According to his latest data, out of 160,000 computers, there are about 20,000 infected computers at any given time.

Despite that, Storm has been remarkably successful. It is called by that name because when it appeared through spam mails in January 2007, it brought breaking news of virulent storms in Europe.

As per the statement by Senior Security Researcher Joe Stewart with SecureWorks, the Storm botnet was subdividing in the third week of October 2007 suggesting that the botnet controller might be thinking of selling off its segmented parts. Cnet published Stewart's statement on October 20, 2007.

Lately, a large volume of 'pump and dump' spam has emerged on account of the Storm worm. The worm has also been responsible for the MP3 stock spam, spotted in the third week of October this year. However, it seems the Storm creators are not interested in identity theft, another area for fraud.

Related article: Storm Worm Returns with Follow-Up Attack

» SPAMfighter News - 11/6/2007