Storm Tries to Spread with Halloween Hoax
It wouldn't be Halloween without some holiday spam and malware. Someone is trying to spread the Storm worm with the promise of a dancing skeleton. According to NetworkWorld:
The latest Storm-backed spam campaign invites e-mail recipients to visit a Halloween-themed Web site where they can download a dancing skeleton. What gets downloaded instead is a version of the Storm malware that turns unsuspecting users’ PCs into members of the world’s largest botnet. Members of these botnets are also known as zombies.
Estimates on the size of the Storm botnet are hard to get, especially distinguishing the live population, which are available at any moment from the footprint, which is the number of infected machines. Some researchers have argued that the Storm botnet is actually shrinking:
Since July, it's been downhill for Storm. That's when antivirus vendors began stepping up their tracking of Storm variants and got a lot better at identifying and cleaning up infected computers, Enright said.Then on September 11, Microsoft added Storm detection (Microsoft's name for Storm's components is Win32/Nuwar) into its Malicious Software Removal tool, which ships with every Windows system. Overnight, Storm infections dropped by another 20%.
Today, Enright said that Storm is about one-tenth of its former size. His most recent data counts 20,000 infected PCs available at any one time, out of a total network of about 160,000 computers. "The size of the network has been falling pretty rapidly and pretty consistently," he said.
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