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

How long before..

[monk.e.boy]

How long before Storm is better than the Internet?

It seems to be peer-2-peer, can host files, must be reliable (DNS and all that), encrypted traffic.

If you assume Internet is past its sell by date, what would the next generation network look like?

:-)

(OK, maybe it wouldn't be owned by the mafia (insert USA joke here))