Researchers Hijack Storm Worm to Track Profits

"A single response from 12 million e-mails is all it takes for spammers to turn annual profits of millions of dollars promoting knockoff pharmaceuticals, according to an unprecedented new study on the economics of spam.
Read more

Spam: Why spam isn’t going away soon

“Recently, Symantec said in its February 2008 State of Spam report that 78.5 percent of all e-mail is spam; they also said most of that is now coming from Europe. That’s a change from previous reports that had suggested servers in North America were responsible. What the Symantec report doesn’t explicitly state is that much of the European spam doesn’t come from individuals sitting at their desks pumping out lists. Europe is one of the hotbeds for the Storm worm botnet, notorious for automatically co-opting its victims into spam relays.
Read more

Security: Limelight kills botnets better than cops do

"Botnet operators have become public enemy number-one as consumers, businesses and governments fall foul to identity theft, DDoS attacks and spam. Yet no one appears to be able to stop the spread of bots — except maybe the media.
Read more

Security: What IT can learn from botnets

"Josh Corman is the host protection architect for Internet Security Systems, Inc. (ISS), with more than eight years of experience in security and networking software. What was refreshing was Corman’s out-of-the-box thinking on the distributed networks currently being used by online criminals. Of the most popular of these networks, he said "Storm did a lot of things right; in some ironic sort of way, you could argue that Storm is itself a blueprint for fighting (botnets)."
Read more

Storm’s Creators Identified

"American and Russian law enforcement agencies have finally identified the criminals behind the Storm worm, one of the nastiest pieces of malware to ever hit the Internet. Now comes the hard part: arresting them.
Read more

Malware: Storm switches tactics third time, adds rootkit

"The ongoing Storm Trojan attack that began Monday has morphed again, security researchers said today, changing the malicious file’s name, shifting to new malware hosting servers, and adding a rootkit to cloak the bot code from anti-virus software.
Read more