Storm Worm Rising

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.

Comments

Maybe there's a silver lining here...

[Novae D'Arx]

I dunno - maybe this is what we need ~ a botnet big enough to do some real damage could actually catalyze some public awareness. Imagine if they DDoS'd MS, or Amazon, heck, Google? Maybe these guys (esp. Google) could handle this kind of slamming, but they've got lobbyists now. I really wouldn't mind seeing a well-funded FBI task force with the express purpose of rooting out botnets and going after their creators. Yeah, yeah, most of them are not on US soil. I know. However, imagine legislation that actually required the disconnection of infected bots from an ISP until it was cleaned, and a public awareness campaign that painted users who allow this to happen as idiots, and the ISPs as protectors of the rest of the internet users. Most people are concerned that there would be a backlash against the ISPs and they would stop complying for fear of loss of business, but that's where the legislation comes in. It's a quarantine situation - just like IRL, if you've got something nasty and contagious, the CDC can legally quarantine (forcibly, if you're an idiot like the TB guy) you because you're endangering the lives of others by going out and exposing them. Same thing here - don't give the botnets a chance to expand, cut them off, force a windows-cleaning (ISPs could offer a cleanup disk, $5.95 plus tax, or something, to help make it worth it for them - don't want to hurt the small ISPs, even though I think TW and the rest are bastards), and let them reconnect afterwards. Simple, painless, and will definitely make sure people learn their lesson for next time.

Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed.

[NickFortune]

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

More accurate, perhaps, to say that they think this is just the way computers don't work.

There was a program on last week where they had a collection of self proclaimed grumpy old women listing things they hated about computers - and you know what? Every single complaint was not about computers per se, but about Microsoft software.

There's got to be an opportunity in there somewhere for the FOSS movement. Imagine if we could convince the "I hate computers" brigade that what they mainly hate is Microsoft ...

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.

That's just silly. People have different convincer strategies. If nothing else, there are people out there who still haven't heard that there's an alternative. There's a lot of meat left on that bone.

Military?

[wytcld]

It's well-known that the Chinese government has an active computer warfare department. A botnet on this scale is way beyond anything needed for mere industrial blackmail. But if you wanted to bring down large chunks of some nation's Internet quickly, without the attack coming from an obvious (and blockable) source, this would be a great weapon. Let's say you wanted to disable the Internet in Taiwan, or South Korea, or Japan, or all three, just prior to military action. Or let's say you wanted to disrupt financial markets to be sure that your intentional crashing of the dollar had maximal effects.