The “Storm Worm” began infecting thousands of mostly home computers in Europe and the United States on Friday, January 19, 2007 using a topical e-mail message with the subject “230 dead as storm batters Europe”.
Don’t click on email messages from addresses you don’t know.
The Storm worm botnet has grown so massive and far-reaching that it easily overpowers the world’s top supercomputers.
That’s the latest word from security researchers who are tracking the burgeoning network of Microsoft Windows machines that have been compromised by the virulent Storm worm, which has pounded the Internet non-stop for the past three months.
… Sergeant said researchers at MessageLabs see about 2 million different computers in the botnet sending out spam on any given day, and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at about 10 percent of capacity.
“We’ve seen spikes where the owner is experimenting with something and those spikes are usually five to 10 times what we normally see,” he said, noting he suspects the botnet could be as large as 50 million computers. “That means they can turn on the taps whenever they want to.”
… It means the cyber criminals who control the botnet have a tremendous amount of destructive power at their fingertips. Early this summer, the Baltic nation of Estonia was pounded in a cyberwar that saw distributed denial-of-service attack primarily targeting the Estonian government, banking, media, and police sites.
… And he added that while the now-well-known e-cards and fake news spam is being used to build up the already massive botnet, the authors are using pump-and-dump scams to make money.
Storm worm botnet more powerful than top supercomputers – Security – www.itnews.com.au
Storm Worm – Wikipedia
Rick McCharles 