Death of a Botnet

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 15 October 2008 20:44

Business IT - Security

"Whoever was behind Storm really set the benchmark at the time for the kind of scale that was achievable with a spambot. They also led the way in using self-perpetuating malicious spam to grow the botnet. They utilised every social engineering trick in the book and invented quite a few of their own" Hays concludes.

And now, after infecting anything around 1 million computers, and being compared to the kind of processing power usually reserved for supercomputers, Storm is no more.

Part of the glory goes, oddly enough, to Microsoft. Back in September 2007 it added Storm to the cross hairs of the Malicious Software Removal Tool, and within a month had cleaned no less than 274,372 computers.

With hundreds of thousands more following in the coming months, by the end of January its share of the spam market had dropped from 20 percent by volume to just 2 percent.

Since then it has rarely exceeded 1 percent.

So what, exactly has happened to the Storm Botnet? Well, Hay reckons there is a "distinct possibility is that the creators of Storm have abandoned it in favour of a newer botnet that they have created. If they have, it is possibly one of the top spam botnets that we continue to track."

Indeed, the chances of the gang behind Storm simply shrugging their shoulders and abandoning such a juicy source of illicit income are lower than John McCain giving Barack Obama a big hug and a kiss in the final Presidential debate.