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Storm Worm Rising

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the goggles-do-nothing dept.

The Storm worm has been an increasing problem in the last few months, but a change in tactics may mean something big is going to happen. The article discusses a bit of back story about the worm, including the somewhat frightening numbers about the millions of spam emails carrying the worm payload. They estimate between a quarter and a million infected systems usable for spam or DDOS attacks.

3 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. NO! by everphilski · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Shouldn't everyone be blocking .exe attackments at the MTA?

    NO! It's annoying enough that Google rapes through my .zip files looking for .exe's.

    If I'm working on a c++ program at work and zip it up and gmail it home (lock the computer while it uploads) and forget to 'make clean' ... I don't get my code. I know its nitpicky and a make clean or a thumb drive will cure my problems but I'm forgetful which tend to preclude both.

  2. "The silent majority" is uninformed. by khasim · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No. "The silent majority" believe that this is the way computers just "work".

    They've been shown that in countless movies and TV shows and by "experts" on the news.

    They're the ones you see claiming that Linux and Mac's will have the "same problems" as their market share increases.

    With all the past outbreaks on Windows machines, anyone who wanted to migrate has already started their migration. This won't change anything for anyone else.

    1. Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed. by Stefanwulf · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They're the ones you see claiming that Linux and Mac's will have the "same problems" as their market share increases.
      Out of curiosity, what aspects of the OSX/BSD and Linux architectures are going to stop:
      • An uneducated user from executing a binary file they download from a URL they are given
      • A process that user is running from executing further code with that user's privileges
      • That user's processes from making outbound TCP/UDP connections
      • That user's processes from accessing an SMTP server to send emails
      • A user from configuring a process to run on logging in
      By my thinking, that's really all that's needed for a botnet to work on a given platform. I am certainly ignorant of many details regarding the BSD/Linux kernels and I stand ready to be corrected, but I believe I've seen all those things happening individually as part of day to day user life on my linux box.