Fergie's Tech Blog

Storm Worm Botnet Attacks Anti-Spam Firms

Sharon Gaudin writes on InformationWeek:

There's no need to warn the anti-spam researchers at the Spamhaus Project about the Storm worm authors' ability to launch massive denial-of-service attacks. They've been fending them off for several months. And they've lived -- or at least stayed online -- to tell the tale.

"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."

Spamhaus is one of the anti-spam organizations that have been targeted in recent months by the Storm worm authors. The malware writers have amassed a giant, international botnet of compromised computers. Estimates of its size range wildly -- from one or two million up to 50 million bots. Regardless of its specific size, though, security researchers say it's definitely large enough to wreak a lot of havoc with a company's network, a government agency, an ISP, or possibly even an entire country, if they use that illegal grid to launch a denial-of-service (DoS) attack.

posted by Fergie @ 9/18/2007 12:10:00 PM