Got Spam? What about full control?

For the past nine months there has been a vicious worm attacking Microsoft platform machines. This worm has been named the “Storm worm”. Storm worm is designed to turn computers of unsuspecting users into zombie machines. It does this by attracting people through bogus e-mail messages which include conformation messages, e-cards and even promising free MP3 downloads or free pornographic pictures and movies. Every time someone clicks on the provided link, the Storm worm downloads malware and turns their machine into a zombie machine.

It all started back in January with only a few thousand attacks registered. As of August 22, 2007 there has been a record of 57 million virus-infected messages sent across the internet. Ninety-nine percent of these messages were traced to the Storm Worm. It is estimated that there are between 5,000 and 6,000 zombie computers being used to send out all the spam messages, a fraction of the computers that have been compromised by the Storm worm.
The creator of the Storm worm is using these infected computers to build the world’s largest botnet. It is estimated that there are 50 million computers associated with this malicious computer grid. With this many computers tied together as one, the botnet could easily overpower the world’s top 500 supercomputers. Also, with this much power, the creator of the Storm worm could bring a country to its knees with ease by launching distributed denial of service attacks against its government, utilities companies and serve providers. These people could do catastrophic damage if they wanted to and is quite scary when you think that this much power is in the hands of criminals.

To make things even more difficult, the botnet knows when its network is being scanned with antivirus or anti-malware software. When the botnet senses that it is being scanned; it seeks out the system that is performing the scan and launches a massive denial of service attack on that computer or network. Again scary since we don’t have any defense against the Storm, but yet in a strange way, very ingenious. A malicious network that protects itself by attacking the attacker (anti-malware scans), it’s like sending a virus a virus but vice versa.

You can read all the articles about the Storm Worm at the following site: http://www.itnews.com.au/BriefingCentre/3,virus-alerts.aspx