New Twists to the Storm Worm Botnet

The Storm Worm may be one of the largest pieces of malicious software on the Internet, accounting for nearly 8% of the world’s infections to include even the most hardened of corporate infrastructures. The rootkit hidden and remotely controlled Botnets have been attributed to massive Denial of Service attacks, to include the cyberwar against Estonia. But two new twists have entered the game, partitions are available for hire and the botnet attacks researchers automatically. With its enormous size, the Storm Worm owners are able to parcel limited control to buyers needing to knock out network segments or conduct a spamming campaign. To further protect itself, the controlling architecture for the botnet has been upgraded to "sense" researchers and immediately launch a Denial of Service attack upon them.