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    The Storm Worm Is Not Causing the Sky to Fall

    By
    Lisa Vaas
    -
    October 17, 2007
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      The scope of the Storm botnet, made up of zombie computers controlled remotely and used to blanket the world in spam, has been estimated to reach from 1 million to 50 million infected systems as of September.

      But has it really?

      Those numbers have reached epic and steadily growing proportions in the media, but they well may be off. SecureWorks thinks the Storm botnet may comprise between 250,000 to 1 million bots overall—”not a terrible threat,” says Joe Stewart, senior security researcher for SecureWorks.

      Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool cleaned it off about 300,000 hosts recently—a number that would be far greater if the botnet were really running on a 50-million-botnet engine, Stewart says.

      As for why the numbers have been pumped so high, it might be that some researchers are counting the total number of peers talking on the Overnet P2P protocol, he suggested. Using that figure wouldn’t discriminate between systems compromised with Storm from normal peers talking to each other, however.

      “Overnet is not just Storm; it’s all these other clients. They could be counting the entire P2P network,” he said.

      For those who like to keep track of what worms or virus families are at the top of the risk list, Microsoft ran some numbers for me on the morning of Oct. 16 PST, based on MSRT telemetry from the October release. The current ranking:

      Win32/Zlob Win32/Renos Win32/RJump Win32/Rbot Win32/Brontok Win32/Jeefo Win32/Hupigon Win32/Virut Win32/Banker

      The Storm virus rate has dropped from No. 3 on the list to No. 10, right below all the worms listed above.

      Here’s why:

      “Storm has dropped on the list because during the first month after the MSRT is updated to remove new malware variants, the MSRT will clean all the available machines that have been infected in the past by this malware. In subsequent months, the MSRT will clean up the machines that are re-infected as well as those that are running MSRT for the first time,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an e-mail.

      Lisa Vaas
      Lisa Vaas is News Editor/Operations for eWEEK.com and also serves as editor of the Database topic center. Since 1995, she has also been a Webcast news show anchorperson and a reporter covering the IT industry. She has focused on customer relationship management technology, IT salaries and careers, effects of the H1-B visa on the technology workforce, wireless technology, security, and, most recently, databases and the technologies that touch upon them. Her articles have appeared in eWEEK's print edition, on eWEEK.com, and in the startup IT magazine PC Connection. Prior to becoming a journalist, Vaas experienced an array of eye-opening careers, including driving a cab in Boston, photographing cranky babies in shopping malls, selling cameras, typography and computer training. She stopped a hair short of finishing an M.A. in English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. She earned a B.S. in Communications from Emerson College. She runs two open-mic reading series in Boston and currently keeps bees in her home in Mashpee, Mass.
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