Storm botnet, revived and now causing panic

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» 28 April 2010

Storm botnet, revived and now causing panic

As reported by the researchers from CA last Tuesday, the ill-famed Storm botnet has been revived after resting silently for almost 18 months.

Storm lived and also met its end

Storm botnet was known for being the main distributor of about 20 percent of all the spam circulating around the world. And, during the month of September of the year 2007, the numbers began to die out after Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool came into the scene. On the first month, the malware-cleaning device was able to clear out the threats in the 274,372 affected computers. After one year, Marshal’s researchers were able to announce the permanent eradication of this threatening entity.

The botnet appeared during the first few months of the year 2007 and it was named “Storm” based on the storms that affected the Europe during the same year. This botnet had become very victorious especially in distributing large quantity of spam mails. Hence, it was able to assist in the appearance of different botnets like the Srizbi, Mega-D, and Rustock. These botnets utilized similar strategies used by the more popular Storm.

New botnet appears to be a copy of the Storm

CA security watchers observed a suspicious activity of a new botnet that shares similar qualities with the already dead Storm botnet. Based on their data that they have gathered, these botnet appeared to have been sending great quantity of spam in the e-mail accounts of the users being aimed at.

The group of researchers found out through their study that the botnet is using command and control hosts. And, the botnet also utilized Base64 encoded data in order to send out the templates and instructions to the affected computer systems. The mails being distributed by this botnet includes topics such as the adult dating service, penis pills, and various pharmacy scams.

Seeing the qualities and activities of this newly discovered botnet, it can be concluded that this entity is very much associated with the long-gone Storm botnet. This was evident through the similar control and mechanism being utilized in order to spy on the content of the e-mails within an account and the people involve in the communication. The head of the CA research team, Don DeBolt, was the one who announced this information.

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