One Fifth of all Spam Hails from Storm
One Fifth of all Spam Hails from Storm
April 3, 2008: MessageLabs has released their latest Intelligence Report which puts the blame for one fifth of the world’s spam emails squarely at the feet of the Storm Botnet.
While there’s no need to batten down the hatches, the Storm Botnet is creating seas of unrest in the security world as it continues to churn out malicious content. The network is made up of zombie computers that are infected with malware and controlled without the owner’s knowledge. The sheer size of the network is what gives it strength and has been estimated to be anywhere between 250,000 to 1 Million computers worldwide.
Botnet’s are particularly hard to control because they constantly defend themselves against those who would seek to bring them down. Security firms who attempt to trace and contain parts of the network will be subjected to a denial-of-service attack from hundreds of thousands of computers should Storm detect them.
Since January, MessageLabs has intercepted more than four million emails from the Storm Botnet which contain links to malware or launching platforms for phishing attacks.
“Storm celebrated its first birthday at the start of the year and commemorated the anniversary with a significant run of nostalgic spam. More than 78 percent of the spam it spewed out this quarter was either focused on male enlargement drugs, replica watches or spam of a sexual nature,” said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst, MessageLabs. “Storm’s focus on spam seems to be just the tip of the iceberg as emails containing malware and phishing attacks from the Storm botnet are now growing in numbers.”
The report also highlights the increasing focus on social networking sites as a security threat, with 11% of companies now blocking access to Facebook, compared to 3% who have pro-actively setup a rule set to allow access.
“Businesses are now becoming wise to the possible impact of social networking and pro-actively raising their defence barriers against data loss, threats and employee productivity,” Sunner said. “Moreover, the possibility of spoofing Facebook accounts is no longer an impossible notion and may be the next major aspect in identity theft.”