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Storm Botnet Subsides
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-05-02
 Security News RSS Feed
Something new may be on tap to replace Storm as the big botnet pest, as its size decreased substantially in April.
Efforts to clean up the Storm botnet drove it down to 5 percent of its original size in April. This puts current estimates of Storm-botnetted machines at around 100,000 machines.
Security vendor MessageLabs said ongoing efforts associated with new Storm cleanup tools purged the malware from infected computers. Some estimates put Storm's botnet at 2 million machines before the big purge took place.
"April was a month of unpredictability, Mark Sunner, Chief Security Analyst at MessageLabs, said in a statement. Storm's decline happened while incidents of attacks escalated.
MessageLabs claimed to observe 70 targeted spam attacks with Trojans per day in April. The upcoming Beijing Olympics persists as a major factor in such spam, with Olympics-related subject lines common for those attacks.
An old spam standby received a bit of a makeover, MessageLabs noted. Criminals are creating fake profiles on business networking sites like LinkedIn to lend credence to the typical 419 scam. They direct recipients to check out their "credentials" on the site to assure them they are dealing with a real person and not some common criminal.
View All Articles by David Utter
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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