Flood of Spam Results in Storm Worm Warnings from Security Experts

[Kristijntje]

The swiftly spiking onslaught of the Storm Worm may signal an upcoming change in how its creators intend to wield their weapon.

I caught up with Joe Stewart, senior security researcher at managed security company SecureWorks, at the Black Hat conference. He says that since June 1st, his company has blocked a boggling 20 million attack e-mails carrying the Storm Worm payload. That's up from just over 70,000 attacks seen during the longer span from the beginning of the year through the end of May.

And that's just from the networks they're seeing. Mail security company Postini recently said that the during the most recent Storm Worm flood, it saw 120 million attack e-mails in the span of five days...

full article: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/08...lence.html

[mandy]

latest update:

But if promises of Kelly Clarkson's latest music video in e-mail weren't enough, the worm has now switched its focus to blogs. Unlike the typical "comment spam" that many of us have grown used to on our personal blogs, the worm is actually getting into people's Blogspot accounts and creating new blog posts with links to the trojan.

Security software firm Sunbelt Software speculates that the posts are being made through Blogspot's mail-to feature, where users can e-mail their blog entries to specific addresses in order to have them posted to their blogs. This theory seems to make the most sense, as the worm would just need to comb the user's local contact list and send itself out to everyone on the list, including Blogspot...

Just how many computers are part of the botnet is anyone's guess, but estimates from some security firms are reaching as high as 10 million...

full article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/200...otnet.html