Storm Worm Being Reduced to a Squall

Rumours of financial schemes surrounding the botnet aside, PC World has an article that should lower the blood pressure of some SysAdmins. The Storm Worm botnet is apparently shrinking. A researcher out of UC San Diego who has been tracking the network has published a report indicating it is now only 10% of its former size. "Some estimates have put Storm at 50 million computers, a number that would give its controllers access to more processing power than the world's most powerful supercomputer. But Enright said that the real story is significantly less terrifying. In July, for example, he said that Storm appeared to have infected about 1.5 million PCs, about 200,000 of which were accessible at any given time. Enright guessed that a total of about 15 million PCs have been infected by Storm in the nine months it has been around, although the vast majority of those have been cleaned up and are no longer part of the Storm network."

Comments

Good

[Colin Smith]

Now that it's down to 5 million we can all breathe a sigh of relief...

Re:Spread of Windows

[Colin Smith]

Hmmm... Windows as a threat to national security ...

Imagines SWAT teams dodging chairs as they storm Microsoft headquarters to screams of "You'll never take me alive copper!"

don't be sure

[phantomfive]

The researcher determined this with a spider he created to crawl the storm network. How does he know that the network is shrinking and not just being partitioned?

Furthermore, the storm virus is known to be updatable. Is it possible it was updated to be even less obtrusive, thus escaping detection in other ways? Maybe it has gone into dormant mode, because the creator doesn't need so many computers at the moment.

One interesting innovation of the worm, quoted from the article:

"If you're a researcher and you hit the pages hosting the malware too much... there is an automated process that automatically launches a denial of service [attack] against you," he said. This attack, which floods the victim's computer with a deluge of Internet traffic, knocked part of the UC San Diego network offline when it first struck.

I think some part of me must be sick or something, because when I read about this I almost hope the worm will get bigger, become unstoppable, and reveal windows for the insecure piece of crap that it is. Linux, BSD, OSX, Solaris, and heck even Minux could clearly stand up to a threat like this much more easily than Windows.

Re:don't be sure

[John Hasler]

> I think some part of me must be sick or something, because when I read about this I
> almost hope the worm will get bigger, become unstoppable, and reveal windows for the
> insecure piece of crap that it is.

Already been done. Nobody cares.

Re:don't be sure

[phantomfive]

Heh, I knew someone was going to trot out this old troll. The point is, it would be much easier to secure unix-type systems than windows-type systems. Compare Microsoft's budget to that of OpenBSD; now tell me, which is more secure?

For it to be effective as a virus, it is going to have to install itself to startup somehow. What is going to do, add a line to my .bashrc? Add a script to /etc/rc.d? It can't do that, only root can, and I don't browse the internet as root. Nobody does.

You may say, "it will prompt you for the password and idiot users will just type it" but you are showing your Windows bias. On windows, you get so many popup prompts that many users just ignore them and do whatever they ask. OSX has shown that it can be done differently, however. Ask any average OSX user what they would do if a downloaded attachment asked them for their root password, and they will say something to the effect of, "Freak out and delete it immmediately." It's because the warnings and prompts in OSX don't become annoying.

Security on Windows is hard. For any vulnerability, it takes a lot more effort to fix on Windows than a similar vulnerability in a Unix system. In unix-world, fixing the OS is an option.

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Myself and some colleagues, along with a couple of anti-malware sites have been tracking Storm infections as best we can over the last couple of months. We've mostly been using honeypots, trapping SMTP traffic and utilizing some nslookup scripts to mine Storm's fast-fluxing domains. It has not shown any sign of shrinking, particularly not by a factor of 10.

The only people who have ever estimated its size to be anywhere near 50 million hosts are paranoid tin-foil hat wearing security analysts and journalists looking to generate some ad revenue with a shocking headline or two. I've never seen any solid evidence pointing towards Storm being larger than 2-3 million hosts, so even assuming there is an exact science at work here, 1.5 million is far from a 10th of 2-3 million.

This phenomenon would be a lot easier to combat if people would stop spreading bullshit stories such as this.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Oblig.

[marcosdumay]

Windows boxes are getting more secure all the time.

But we can only guess when they will be ready for widespread use...

Re:Spread of Windows

[rustalot42684]

But then SWAT is beaten back by Clippy:
It looks like you're trying to raid the Redmond campus. Would you like to:

• Hunt and kill all the employees
• Destroy the supercomputer cores
• Uncover the secret plot for world domination
• Just raid the campus without help

# Don't show me this tip again

Re:Mac and Linux users

[TheRaven64]

Just breathed a collective sigh of relief... Oh wait, maybe they were just rolling their eyes and sighing. No, we get spam from Windows zombies the same as everyone else.

...reduced to a Squall

[Wonko the Sane]

So it now has a scar on it's face, and carries a sword-gun?

Re:Mac and Linux users

[Torvaun]

Windows can be secured. I've got an XP desktop for gaming, and I run Linux on my laptop. Neither of them get viruses. My protection suite is all free software, so there's no annual fee there. And, if enough regular people switched to something with a Unix base, they'd have virus issues too. There are viruses and rootkits for systems other than Windows. They aren't prolific because the average moron who clicks everything is on Windows.

Yes, those systems are more secure than Windows. No, they are not secure enough to deal with the assault of a wave of moronic users. Feel free to dream of an exodus away from Windows, but understand that nothing will change, even if your dream comes true.

Re:Spread of Windows

[Keruo]

> It also appears that the Malicious Software Removal Tool doesn't require validation either.

Fixed your link.

Re:Oblig.

[morgan_greywolf]

I think that the problem of viruses would be greatly reduced if people were less ignorant about viruses.

I think the problem of viruses would be greatly reduced if people were less ignorant about how their behavior causes them to get viruses.

Windows can be an okay operating system security-wise, if people didn't do these things:

Run Internet Explorer: IE is buggy and and insecure. If everyone replaced it with Firefox with the NoScript plugin installed, you could watch how much fewer viruses there would be.

Run Outlook or Outlook Express: Mail programs shouldn't have scripting abilities that can take control of the entire OS. Watch how much fewer viruses would exist if people would run Thunderbird instead.

Download programs from untrusted sites: Lots of random malware, spyware and viruses are installed because users the latest 'cute' or 'cool' thing their friend told them about.

Enable VBA macros to autorun in Microsoft Office documents. Turn off macros.

Run as Administrator: Either learn how to use your OS properly or upgrade to Vista. Seriously.


Eliminate these behaviors and you will have removed the most common vectors of infection on Windows machines.

Re:Spread of Windows

[diskis]

That argument is getting a bit dated. Linux is used more and more as servers. More processing power, more bandwidth and not so competent administrators. I know a lot of machines sitting un-updated on 100mbit or faster. They have been sitting for years serving as storage for irc logs, simpsons episodes and funny pictures. Still they are not part of any botnets.

Re:looking for details on storm botnet control

[ymgve]

A few days old now, but these IPs are some of the ones that have been taken over to host the malware. Add http:/// to the front, and download the executables from there.

!!! WARNING - THESE SITES CONTAINS JAVASCRIPT EXPLOITS AND POSSIBLY OTHER EXPLOITS - APPROACH WITH CAUTION !!!

70.241.136.75
24.31.16.133
68.58.22.93
69.153.22.0
24.30.230.51
75.23.213.0
76.22.95.226
76.87.15.223
213.85.39.178
68.126.134.102
68.81.124.62
200.127.28.133
68.158.67.73
68.42.159.205
66.30.37.175
12.202.175.97
200.106.170.69
86.127.5.24
195.3.220.153
24.0.96.97

Yes, but at what cost?

[gillbates]

Sure, you can secure Windows. You can also make Linux run Windows programs. If you're willing to put in the effort, I suppose you could run a web server on a C64 (Hey! Some people have!)

But the point is that it's a lot more practical to just buy a Mac if you're a non-technical user. You get ease of use, with none of the security and stability problems of Windows.

And if you are technical, and are going to put in the effort to learn a system in depth, why would you pick Windows? If you learn Linux, you can transfer that knowledge to working on UNIX systems, and the usefulness of your knowledge isn't subject to the capricious actions of a convicted felon (Microsoft). Sure, you could secure Windows, but every time Redmond releases another version, your knowledge becomes obsolete.

But there are a few additional points about Windows:

1. Windows has at least one - if not two or three - orders of magnitude more security vulnerabilities than Linux or Mac. This alone suggests that the problem of Windows security is much greater than that of Linux or Mac security, regardless of the reason.
2. A Windows system requires constant patching to remain relatively secure, and even so, there's always a small window of opportunity when even fully patched systems are vulnerable. (i.e, the time between the black hats discovering the exploit and the time white hats find it; and the time between notification and the time Microsoft is able to issue an update). Even though you are fully patched, your system still contains vulnerabilities yet undiscovered by the security researchers, but known to black hats.
3. Constant patching is not a viable option for most companies which must test patches for interoperability. In many cases, a company's own internal testing takes longer than it takes hackers to publish an exploit for the vulnerability. In such cases, their machines are never truly secure, even though they patch constantly.
4. You don't have the source code, so you can't audit it. Given that Microsoft was recently caught modifying files on their customers' computers without their consent, this is very troubling. You can't trust Microsoft to do what they say they will, nor can you verify they are.
5. You don't control what gets turned on by default, and sometimes a major, required component of Windows has security flaws (Blaster, anyone?). With UNIX like system, you can simply strip the box down to the bare minimum to achieve greater security.
6. Windows has a maze of interdependencies which often means that you simply cannot uninstall a problematic part of the OS. Take IE for example - though it can technically be uninstalled, it is required by even the most basic OS functions, which means that removing it is not a realistic option for the end user. Yet it continues to be a wellspring of security problems, made even worse by the fact that it isn't practical to run a system without it.

So sure, you can make Windows relatively secure, compared to other Windows boxes. But for the same amount of effort, you could secure a Linux machine to a much greater degree, and have a stable, trustworthy system as well. Sure, neither system is perfect, but for the effort you expend, you get a much better system by installing Linux or buying a Mac.

And I suppose a slashdot post wouldn't be complete without some anecdotal evidence. In the 10 years that I've been in the industry, every single one of my Windows using relatives have needed me to recover one of their crashed/unstable/unusably slow Windows systems. In fact, prior to XP, I had only met one person who both ran Windows and had not had it crash on them. And yet, even though Apple commands about 10% of the market, I have only once been asked if I could recover an Apple computer. And even then, it took only about 1/2 hour, and the guy didn't lose any of his data (he tried to update OS X, and botched it, but even then, he still was able to reco