Storm Worm Botnet Attacks Anti-Spam Firms

"It's been a pretty constant battle to stay online," Vincent Hanna, an investigator for the non-profit Spamhaus Project, told InformationWeek. "It's an arms race. They try something. We block it. They try something else. We block it. It goes on and on. Sometimes it's fine and sometimes we spend hours a day on this." Link.

Storm Worm Spams Its Own Bots

When Botnets Go Wild. Link.

Corman said the Storm Worm is an "instantiation of a class of botnets" that is being used in attacks such as pump-and-dump campaigns to derive profits for its authors. It communicates through decentralized peer-to-peer networks, which makes it difficult to stop.

If the Storm Worm authors find a way to monetize other uses for the botnet, users may see an influx of DDoS attacks that could paralyze some organizations. Some businesses are preparing for such an incident by reassessing their disaster recovery capabilities, Corman said.

He said he also worries about a political motive: For example, Storm could impact the websites of presidential candidates, or be used to deliver spam that may sway voter's decisions, Corman said.

Storm Worm Botnet now "more powerful than world's top supercomputer"

The Storm Worm Botnet, a massive network of infected Windows PCs spanning the world, has now enslaved enough computers to rival the processing power of top military computers. This is incredible.

"If you calculate pure theoretical throughput, then I'm sure the botnet has more capacity than IBM's BlueGene. If you sat them down to play chess, the botnet would win."

Link.

"Storm Worm" adds millions of computers to botnet

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070902-storm-worm-adds-millions-of-computers-to-botnet.html

Storm Worm Rising

The Storm Worm is a huge botnet that may have commandeered up to 2 million PCs around the world. You visit a site, download a piece of malware, and unbeknownst to you, your computer becomes just another 'zombie' node in the botnet army. Then the creators use yours and the other computers on the network to launch spam or denial-of-service (DDos) attacks.

As sci-fi writer Sterling himself says,

The Storm worm is an amazing piece of work. Anyone who has taken the time to reverse engineer Storm will tell you that it is a very sophisticated piece of software and it is highly unlikely that it was created just to send spam.

Link.

First the web, Now The Grid

Interesting story on Europe's particle-physic lab CERN's invention of a next-generation network to store their quadrillion bytes of experimental data. Link.

Experts: Scrap The Internet And Start Again

Just days after plans were announced to launch the Internet in space, this story breaks on completely rebuilding the Internet from the ground up.

"Other government agencies, including the US Defence Department, have also been exploring the concept....A new network could run parallel with the current internet and eventually replace it."

This is an interesting point on why the Internet is increasingly obselete:

"The Internet's designers also assumed that computers were in fixed locations and always connected. That's no longer the case with the proliferation of laptops, personal digital assistants and other mobile devices, all hopping from one wireless access point to another, losing their signals here and there.