Storm Worm Botnet Partitions May Be Up For Sale

Bowling for cents writes "There is evidence that the massive Storm Worm botnet is being broken up into smaller networks, and a ZDNet post thinks that's a surefire sign that the CPU power is up for sale to spammers and denial-of-service attackers. The latest variants of Storm are now using a 40-byte key to encrypt their Overnet/eDonkey peer-to-peer traffic, meaning that each node will only be able to communicate with nodes that use the same key. This effectively allows the Storm author to segment the Storm botnet into smaller networks. This could be a precursor to selling Storm to other spammers, as an end-to-end spam botnet system, complete with fast-flux DNS and hosting capabilities."

Comments

The dude is a playa

[WwWonka]

From the article "Stewart, a reverse engineering guru who has been tracking Storm Worm closely" along with his stunning picture can only mean these spammers are TRULY being tracked diligently between his games of WOW and hourly five minute visits to the pr0n sites that these spammers are promoting themselves!

Re:Survival of the fittest in action

[Hatta]

At what point does having a multi-use computing device become more of a problem than the benefits it provides?

When you install windows on it.