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Storm Worm Rising
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Aug 08, 2007 10:33 AM
from the goggles-do-nothing dept.
from the goggles-do-nothing dept.
The Storm worm has been an increasing problem in the last few months, but a change in tactics may mean something big is going to happen. The article discusses a bit of back story about the worm, including the somewhat frightening numbers about the millions of spam emails carrying the worm payload. They estimate between a quarter and a million infected systems usable for spam or DDOS attacks.
Related Stories
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Storm Worm More Powerful Than Top Supercomputers 390 comments
Stony Stevenson writes to mention that some security researchers are claiming that the Storm Worm has grown so massive that it could rival the world's top supercomputers in terms of raw power. "Sergeant said researchers at MessageLabs see about 2 million different computers in the botnet sending out spam on any given day, and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at about 10 percent of capacity. 'We've seen spikes where the owner is experimenting with something and those spikes are usually five to 10 times what we normally see,' he said, noting he suspects the botnet could be as large as 50 million computers. 'That means they can turn on the taps whenever they want to.'"
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Storm Worm Botnet Partitions May Be Up For Sale 192 comments
Bowling for cents writes "There is evidence that the massive Storm Worm botnet is being broken up into smaller networks, and a ZDNet post thinks that's a surefire sign that the CPU power is up for sale to spammers and denial-of-service attackers. The latest variants of Storm are now using a 40-byte key to encrypt their Overnet/eDonkey peer-to-peer traffic, meaning that each node will only be able to communicate with nodes that use the same key. This effectively allows the Storm author to segment the Storm botnet into smaller networks. This could be a precursor to selling Storm to other spammers, as an end-to-end spam botnet system, complete with fast-flux DNS and hosting capabilities."
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How are these numbers calculated? (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously though, how does one go about estimating these numbers? Is it something as simple as an estimate of what proportion of infected e-mails are expected to result in an infected desktop? I doubt that would give a very accurate figure.
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Re:How are these numbers calculated? (Score:4, Informative)
"Joe Stewart, senior security researcher at managed security company SecureWorks, at the Black Hat conference.
From the number of infected machines he's found, Stewart estimates that the Storm botnet could comprise anywhere from 250,000 to 1 million infected computers. And that raises questions, along with eyebrows. "
Parent
Re:How are these numbers calculated? (Score:5, Informative)
In reality, the only source that can give you a precise count for the Storm botnet is the Storm controller - and he/she's not talking. So we do the best we can at estimating its size given the data available.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How are these numbers calculated? (Score:5, Funny)
- 1. Roll 2D6
- 2. Take the number rolled, and multiply it times the number of worm messages that have arrived in your inbox.
- 3. If your computer is actually infected, square the result.
- 4. Play a game of Solitare
- 5. Add your final score to the result
- 6. Divide the result by your Boss's vigilance.
- 7. Make a saving throw against discovery, and multiply the result by 1000
- 8. Round up to the nearest 100,000
- 9. Publish
- 10. Profit!
Lower bounds are trickier as they will require you to actually care about what you're doing.Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Microsoft is going to lose big (Score:3, Insightful)
"The silent majority" is uninformed. (Score:5, Insightful)
They've been shown that in countless movies and TV shows and by "experts" on the news.
They're the ones you see claiming that Linux and Mac's will have the "same problems" as their market share increases.
With all the past outbreaks on Windows machines, anyone who wanted to migrate has already started their migration. This won't change anything for anyone else.
Parent
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed. (Score:5, Interesting)
More accurate, perhaps, to say that they think this is just the way computers don't work.
There was a program on last week where they had a collection of self proclaimed grumpy old women listing things they hated about computers - and you know what? Every single complaint was not about computers per se, but about Microsoft software.
There's got to be an opportunity in there somewhere for the FOSS movement. Imagine if we could convince the "I hate computers" brigade that what they mainly hate is Microsoft ...
That's just silly. People have different convincer strategies. If nothing else, there are people out there who still haven't heard that there's an alternative. There's a lot of meat left on that bone.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The usual stuff. Clippy, Outlook, "you appear to be writing a letter", Word's grammar checker... that sort of thing. Nip over to annoyances.org and you'll find a hundred or so examples.
Oh do behave. That argument might fly for specialist drafting or accountancy software, but not here. For the market segment under discussion, all people want is a browser, a word processor, something to check their em
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why wouldn't YouTube work with Linux? YouTube runs on Linux. http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=youtube.c om [netcraft.com]
There is a Linux version of flash, it was behind for a while but YouTube still worked even then. I have no probl
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed. (Score:5, Informative)
No, but they are Microsoft though - which is what I said in the first place.
You're right, I just used it as a loose example. I'd be more specific about the complaints, but I wasn't expecting a test, and I forgot to make notes. All I can do is report what I remember from the show.
meh. It's a support forum, not an advocacy site. It's not so much "Microsoft sucks" as "what do I do when when the registry fills up?". You don't get a lot of penguin heads there because... well, because we all use Linux and it's a windows support forum.
Hatred isn't a rational act, though, is it? I mean, most people don't wake up in the morning and say "now who shall I hate today? Who is the most rational target for my hatred?". It's not like that. On the other hand, there's no shortage of people who think "if that computer crashes and loses my document one more time today, it's going through that window..." My point is that a lot of the things I heard cited as inspiring this hatred were typical MS grumbling points.
And if it's a good enough reason to hate computers, it's good enough to hate Microsoft. It's just a question of education ;)
Oh quite possibly, although the latest Ubuntu is getting very good in that respect. But they'd be spared the malware, and the viruses and the worms... which is the starting point for this discussion.
Yes, perfectly. At least since flash 9 was released for Linux.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They could indeed. Probably not those particular ones however. The show is callled Grumpy Old Women [bbc.co.uk] and takes a handful of the BBC's more curmudgeonly female celebs and gives them free rein to gripe about the things that wind them up. Not as good as Grumpy Old Men (IMHO) but that could be down to gender bias on my part.
The "silent majority" however (and no, it's not my choice of phrase, either) don'
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And all of them so very tast^Wdifferent, too! :)
Convincer strategies was something they told us about on a training course I went on a while back. A convincer strategy is what has to happen inside someone's head before they accept a given proposition as being true.
So, one person's convincer strategy might be that he needs to hear it a certain number of times (and all you need to do is keep on at them) while someone else might need to try it for themselves. Some
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Well, it is changing it for me! I got an ecard from "friend" and I downloaded the exe on my iMac, and it won't work. I could not see the card. I tried again on my Red Hat Enterprise 4 server, and even after chmod +x *AND* running as root with X windows going, the card would not open.
That is the last straw for me! I can't get cards from my "friend". I a
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed. (Score:5, Funny)
--
Try to hack my 31337 firewall! [127.0.0.1]
Yeah, you really should do; you clearly need a more secure OS than the one you're running now. I just hacked your firewall, and man have you got a lot of weird stuff on there.
Parent
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed. (Score:4, Insightful)
- An uneducated user from executing a binary file they download from a URL they are given
- A process that user is running from executing further code with that user's privileges
- That user's processes from making outbound TCP/UDP connections
- That user's processes from accessing an SMTP server to send emails
- A user from configuring a process to run on logging in
By my thinking, that's really all that's needed for a botnet to work on a given platform. I am certainly ignorant of many details regarding the BSD/Linux kernels and I stand ready to be corrected, but I believe I've seen all those things happening individually as part of day to day user life on my linux box.Parent
Re:Microsoft is going to lose big (Score:5, Informative)
WTF are you talking about? RTFA, please. If you actually did that before funboying around, you'd notice that the program in question is not a worm at all, but a trojan. User has to manually run the attachment, probably clicking through a couple of dialogs practically begging him not to. But, since the user really, really _wants_ to see the cute kittens, or a naked celebrity, or whatever the trojan claims to be, trojan will be run. No OS can defend against the user being a sucker.
So, move along, please. Your tirade is totally off topic here.
Parent
Love the tag "situationnormal" (Score:3, Informative)
SNAFU (Situation Normal: All F***ed Up)
* Before I get 10 million suggestions for a decade-past issue, yes we did find more effective ways of blocking it.
Naked teens attack home director (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Worm [wikipedia.org]
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Question on that article (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Worm [wikipedia.org]
Perhaps to avoid infecting government servers (and upping the ante, if he got caught)? That's the only thing I could think of. I'm sure there's a very logical reason, but I have no idea what it might be.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The companies that care enough about their security issues are those with critical servers, and many of these use win 2K3.
Storm affecting these boxes would mean quicker detection of the virus, and lesser migration. Without these (and with users who dont update anti-virus signatures very regularly), the virus has a greater potential of spreading. Of course, the author didn't imagine Storm would be this popular, and that t
worth worrying about (Score:4, Interesting)
Catalyst for change? (Score:4, Interesting)
#1. Spoofed IP addresses - not that common anymore. It used to be that you'd tie up a machine by having it send replies to machines that did not initiate the connection. There is a simple solution to this. Anyone assigned a block of IP addresses has to make sure that all outbound traffic references IP addresses on that block.
#2. Thousands of machines eating up your bandwidth - the most common type now. This is where the zombie army each makes continued requests of your machine. For webservers, they can request a page over and over and over until they use up all your bandwidth and legitimate visitors cannot get through. This is more difficult to fix. It can partially be handled by blocking the range of addresses that host the zombies. Such as Comcast and Verizon and so forth. There are more complicated attacks. Such has sending half a request.
There's not much that can be done with #2 until a law gets passed saying that the person paying for the Internet connection is responsible for $X of clean-up charges. Then people will have a financial incentive to look at more secure systems.
Parent
Why not offer to swap them ahead of time? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why wait?
... automatically?
Why not take a few pro-active measures? Such as emailing all your clients with the new rules and offering to assist them in evaluating their systems
More information (Score:5, Informative)
Shouldn't everyone be blocking
NO! (Score:5, Insightful)
NO! It's annoying enough that Google rapes through my
If I'm working on a c++ program at work and zip it up and gmail it home (lock the computer while it uploads) and forget to 'make clean'
Parent
Re:NO! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:NO! (Score:4, Informative)
I've just switched to using RAR and as for now Google is leaving my attachments alone...
M Addario
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
It annoys me as well, the number of zips I have called
Maybe - just maybe - google could consider allowing zips to account users who have specified it as a preference (default block as currently occurs).
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Especially when a user is sending it to himself
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Re:More information (Score:4, Insightful)
For me the biggest problem with these is that there is no attachment for AV to pick off and there is hardly any text and no real advertising in the email so our spam filters don't block it either.
Parent
What does God need with a starship? (Score:2, Redundant)
"Why do you need a botnet that big?" he asks. "You don't need a million [infected computers] to send spam."
For spam, a million-strong botnet might be overkill. But botnets can do much more - like launching denial-of-service attacks. These attacks aim to overwhelm a Web site or Internet server by sending it a constant stream of garbage data at a particular Web site or Internet server.
So the question is, who is controlling these botnets and why? DDoS attacks can be pretty useful if someone wants to get a point across or to extort money from someone or some company. It will be interesting to see if they can trace it back to the source.
Re:What does God need with a starship? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Removal Tool (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Removal Tool (Score:5, Funny)
The goggle really might do nothing.
Parent
Re:Removal Tool (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
that is why (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe there's a silver lining here... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What technically minded people in general forget is that most users want their security soluti
Beyond the slashdot effect... (Score:2, Informative)
A few years back there was a spate of DDOS attacks on root servers, for example: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jh tml?articleID=197004237 [informationweek.com] which were described at the time as "
An email warning I got yesterday (Score:3, Interesting)
Military? (Score:5, Interesting)
Had this show up (Score:3, Interesting)
Hi. Worshipper has sent you a greeting card.
See your card as often as you wish during the next 15 days.
SEEING YOUR CARD
If your email software creates links to Web pages, click on your card's direct www address below while you are connected to the Internet:
http://682.81.0.23/?9907cd64e28cae3d7703a3b01bda de (Poster's note: This URL has been altered to protect the rampant mad clickers amongst us)
Or copy and paste it into your browser's "Location" box (where Internet addresses go).
We hope you enjoy your awesome card.
Wishing you the best, Administrator, americangreetings.comMandatory Disconnect of Infected Computers (Score:3, Insightful)
Then if a botnet attack comes, turn off the overseas pipes as needed. Yeah I am a dreamer, but I am at least half way practical.
Re:Cool (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm going to call it a net win for productivity and busniess in general. Which means that it's most likely that big business is behind the internet shutdown...and the Storm worm.
Shit, where'd I put that damned tinfoil hat...
Parent