'Storm' still doing damage

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 01 February 2007 05:05

Your IT - Home IT

The Storm/Dorf/Peacomm worm continues to circulate in various guises, and represented almost half of the malware detected in January by security vendor Sophos. The company says it has detected more than 2500 variants of the worm. "[P]reying upon public interest by using breaking news events is a tried and trusted trick.  It has proven to be a remarkably effective method of fooling recipients into lowering their guard," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant.

Storm accounted for 46.1 percent of malware detected during January 2007. The tenacious Netsky and Mytob took distant second and third places in the rogues gallery, with 16.1 and 9.8 percent respectively.

Symantec's Threat Explorer shows Storm as having the highest severity level among current threats.