Storm Worm More Powerful Than Top Supercomputers

Stony Stevenson writes to mention that some security researchers are claiming that the Storm Worm has grown so massive that it could rival the world's top supercomputers in terms of raw power. "Sergeant said researchers at MessageLabs see about 2 million different computers in the botnet sending out spam on any given day, and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at about 10 percent of capacity. 'We've seen spikes where the owner is experimenting with something and those spikes are usually five to 10 times what we normally see,' he said, noting he suspects the botnet could be as large as 50 million computers. 'That means they can turn on the taps whenever they want to.'"

Comments

Co-opt it.. remove it.

[bigattichouse]

I just don't see why if 1) there are known decompiled versions of it and 2) the network activity can be monitored. why 3) Hasn't code been written to exploit the 'sploit and shut them down. Something that infiltrates, but keeps them running for - oh, say a week - while the exploit percolates through the system, and then kills and patches the running process.

Re:Co-opt it.. remove it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not aware of any decompiled version. Storm detects when it's being run in a virtual machine and features heavy obfuscation and code morphing.

I see storm as a monoculture problem, the blame can largely be leveled at Microsoft.