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

What does God need with a starship?

[Billosaur]

"Why do you need a botnet that big?" he asks. "You don't need a million [infected computers] to send spam."

For spam, a million-strong botnet might be overkill. But botnets can do much more - like launching denial-of-service attacks. These attacks aim to overwhelm a Web site or Internet server by sending it a constant stream of garbage data at a particular Web site or Internet server.

So the question is, who is controlling these botnets and why? DDoS attacks can be pretty useful if someone wants to get a point across or to extort money from someone or some company. It will be interesting to see if they can trace it back to the source.