WINDOWS ALERT: STORM WORM HAS BEEN QUIETLY SPREADING SINCE JANUARY!

October 27, 2007

WINDOWS ALERT: "STORM" WORM HAS BEEN QUIETLY SPREADING SINCE JANUARY! http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=112029

Posted By: Olde_Seeker <Send E-Mail>Friday, 26 October 2007, 7:07 p.m.

Imagine how many PC`s are already compromised.. Is this ingenious worm an 'indefensible' cyber-weapon? So far there is no cure for it`s unique infection and since majority are using Windows, it is a potential disaster! -- In millions of Windows, the perfect Storm is gathering John Naughton Sunday October 21, 2007 The Observer A spectre is haunting the net but, outside of techie circles, nobody seems to be talking about it. The threat it represents to our security and wellbeing may be less dramatic than anything posed by global terrorism, but it has the potential to wreak much more havoc. And so far, nobody has come up with a good idea on how to counter it. It's called the Storm worm. It first appeared at the beginning of the year, hidden in email attachments with the subject line: '230 dead as storm batters Europe'. The PC of anyone who opened the attachment became infected and was secretly enrolled in an ever-growing network of compromised machines called a 'botnet'. The term 'bot' is a derivation of 'software robot', which is another way of saying that an infected machine effectively becomes the obedient slave of its - illicit - owner. If your PC is compromised in this way then, while you may own the machine, someone else controls it. And they can use it to send spam, to participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks on banks, e-commerce or government websites, or for other even more sinister purposes. (snip) At the moment, nobody knows who's behind this. Is it a Russian mafia operation? An al-Qaeda scheme? The really creepy thing is that, to date, the controllers of Storm have used it for such relatively trivial purposes. The suspicion has to be that they are biding their time, waiting for the moment when, say, 100 million naive Windows users have clicked on an infected link and unwittingly added their machines to the botnet. Link to more information: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,2195730,00.html