Record-breaking 'Storm' linked to spam surge
Storm, the Trojan that Hoovers PCs into hacker-controlled botnets, roared back into life last month in several waves, security researchers said Monday, and has blown by 2005's Sober to become the most prolific e-mail-borne malware ever.
"This is the biggest since Sober in mid-to-late 2005," said Sam Masiello, the director of threat research at MX Logic, referring to a long-lasting worm whose variants struck repeatedly in the second half of 2005, often in extremely high numbers. In November 2006, for instance, e-mail filtering companies reported malware-laden e-mail counts spiking 1,500% in a week, and said they were intercepting four times the usual number of infected messages.
According to MX Logic, Storm -- a bot Trojan that collects compromised computers into large networks of ready-to-use PCs -- has broken Sober's records. Thanks to Storm, the Englewood, Colo. managed e-mail security vendor tracked a July jump in malicious e-mail of 1,700% over June.
Storm, however, is much more malevolent than Sober ever dreamed. "Not only is it designed to propagate more copies of Storm, but it releases huge quantities of spam," said Masiello.
Security analysts, Wood and Masiello among them, have been drawing a line between Storm's success and spam outbursts of July and August, including one that dropped impressive quantities of "pump-and-dump" stock scam mail in mailboxes worldwide. "Certain Trojans are specifically written not only to make their own botnet larger, but to propagate specific types of spam," Masiello said.
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