Fergie's Tech Blog

The Storm Worm's Family Tree

Brian Krebs writes on Security Fix:

New research suggests that the infamous Storm worm has its roots in a computer worm that first surfaced as early as 2004, two-and-a-half years prior to Storm's widely-recognized birthday.

The findings come from security researchers at Damballa, a start-up in Atlanta that monitors activity from botnets, large groupings of hacked, remotely-controlled computers that criminals use for spamming and other online illegal activity.

According to the researchers, Storm was born from the ashes of the "Bobax worm," one of the most successful botnet-related computer worms of the past few years. Bobax spread by exploiting various vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system, and turned infected machines into spam-spewing zombies. By early 2005, Bobax had spread to hundreds of thousands of PCs, after a highly successful spam campaign that used infected e-mail attachments disguised as pictures purportedly showing Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden captured or dead.

posted by Fergie @ 2/07/2008 01:30:00 PM