[skiwi]

In millions of Windows, the perfect Storm is gathering

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'J')ohn Naughton Sunday October 21, 2007
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...

...Storm has been spreading steadily since last January, gradually constructing a huge botnet. It affects only computers running Microsoft Windows, but that means that more than 90 per cent of the world's PCs are vulnerable. Nobody knows how big the Storm botnet has become, but reputable security professionals cite estimates of between one million and 50 million computers worldwide. To date, the botnet has been used only intermittently, which is disquieting: what it means is that someone, somewhere, is quietly building a doomsday machine that can be rented out to the highest bidder, or used for purposes that we cannot yet predict...

...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.

Only then will we know what a perfect storm in cyberspace is like.

[jasonraymondson]

I don't really buy it. If this guy was able to get so much news about this then I am sure that symantec and the rest would already have started building in fixes

[MacG]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('skiwi', '[')url=http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,2195730,00.html]In millions of Windows, the perfect Storm is gathering[/url]

Another good reason to be sitting in front of a mac

[jasonraymondson]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MacG', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('skiwi', '[')url=http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,2195730,00.html]In millions of Windows, the perfect Storm is gathering[/url]

Another good reason to be sitting in front of a mac

[Kylon]

THat's why we need Linux baby, yeah!

[strider3700]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kylon', 'T')Hat's why we need Linux baby, yeah!

[jasonraymondson]

Or maybe what we need to do is get away from computer all together

[Zardoz]

Just How Bad Is the Storm Worm?

Storm Worm may have blown itself out

Proper antivirus programs, kept up to date, will take care of it.