Death of a Botnet

By Davey Winder
Wednesday, 15 October 2008 19:44

Security

The once King of Spam is dead. But before you celebrate too much, His Royal Spamness has been terminally ill for many months, and there are plenty of young pretenders ready to wear the junk mail crown.

Just a few months ago it was being reported that six botnets controlled the distribution of a staggering 85 percent of all spam.

Storm was a premium player as far as spam was concerned, responsible for those "USA declares war on Iran" emails designed to hook people into opening malware-linked emails and ultimately assimilate them into the Storm botnet collective.

Indeed, Storm Botnet picked up the name from one of the early 2007 email subject lines which warned of lethal storms in Europe.

Of course, when you reach the top of any tree you become a target for those who want to take your place. And so it was that the Rustock Botnet gangs enlisted the help of George Bush and Paris Hilton to push its global share of the spam market up to 21 percent during the summer.

Even that, though, was not enough to elevate it above Srizbi.

And now comes the news that everyone in the IT security game was waiting for: the death of Storm. The guys from the Marshal TRACE Team has reported that spam originating from the Storm botnet ceased altogether during September 2008.

Phil Hay, Lead Threat Analyst for TRACE, argues that Storm was one of the first botnets to use the malicious spam tactic, along with electronic greetings cards and other things on such a massively successful scale. "It became the most successful botnet of its type and established the basic template for developing a spam empire that other botnets have since copied" Hays says.

So how powerful was Storm, and what exactly has happened to it now? More on page 2...

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