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

SpamNation

Storm Worm – Wikipedia

My buddy Tom works for a very influential newspaper in California.

He and his colleagues are facing layoffs.

… finally, a newspaper executive says publicly what I’ve been thinking for the past couple years: the newspaper biz is broken, badly, and has to be transformed into something else — something, …

… All across the newspaper biz, papers are seeing, for the first time, declining revenues. Used to be they could charge higher prices for ads and subscriptions because people had no choice but to pay. Now they have a choice, and that choice is biting our business in the butt cheeks.

In the old days, newspapers made so much money that they could print pretty much anything they wanted in their news columns. It got Nixon tossed out of office but it also created an environment where people got out of the habit of fighting and scratching to hold an audience. We’ve all got flabby beer guts where our save-the-industry washboard abs need to be. …

Yeah, things look bleak today. And they’ll get worse in a couple weeks when more of us get our walking papers. And it won’t be easy trying to save a business with the people who got us in this fix to begin with. Newspapers used to be like the communist bloc before the Berlin Wall fell: they had a monopoly that gave them short-term power, but the corruption of power was eating away at their prospects for long-term survivability.

Well, the Wall has fallen.

Trying to build something from the rubble will be some fun, I expect. Am I worried about getting the ax? Not really. There are other ways of making a living. If I am shown the door, well, all I can say is, good luck rescuing the patient without people who believe the patient’s life is worth saving.

I’m not giving up on newspapers till they give up on me.

Busy being born: June 2007 Archives

I’m not worried for Tom. He’s perfectly placed as editor of a popular hiking blog to be part of the future news business model.