Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
News
Storm Botnet Ebbing, Says UC San Diego Analyst
11/8/2007
An Oct. 20 presentation at the ToorCon hacker conference by Brandon Enright, a computer security researcher at the University of California, San Diego, struck a nerve in the CS community by concluding that the notorious Storm Worm could be losing steam."The size of the network has been falling pretty rapidly and pretty consistently," Enright told the conference during his presentation, which was titled, "Exposing Storm."
The Storm worm emerged in January as one of the first pieces of malware to use a P2P network for command and control, Enright said in his presentation, "making it one of the most resilient bots ever." The lack of a centralized command and control has made it highly resistant to countermeasures, he said.
Enright said the extent of the Storm network has been unscientifically reported by media outlets as between 1 million and 50 million bots. "Fortunately, most of these estimates are inaccurate or completely wrong," according to his presentation.
Since July, when a a concerted e-mail attack infected an estimated 1.5 million PCs, Storm has ebbed somewhat.
Enright ascribed this to aggressive work by anti-virus vendors. In particular, Microsoft Corp.'s addition of Storm detection in September to its Malicious Software Removal Tool put a "measurable dent" in the network, Enright reported.
Read More:
Paul McCloskey is a contributing editor for the Campus Technology group of publications.
Cite this Site
copy text (above) for proper citation
Recommended Reading
- Tufts Grants Rights for Mileage-Increasing Transportation Technology to Electric Truck
Tufts University has optioned rights to a technology that can recharge the batteries of any hybrid electric and electric-powered vehicle while it is driven. The Tufts-developed technology could increase by 20 percent to 70 percent the miles per gallon or total driving range performance of vehicles like the Honda Civic, Ford Escape, and Toyota Prius hybrids and the Tesla Motors and Phoenix Motorcars electric vehicles.
- U Florida and Cyntellect Collaborate to Unlock Mysteries of Cancer Stem Cells
The University of Florida has entered into a research agreement with life sciences company Cyntellect. The university's Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research will work with the company to focus on a variety of research areas including the purification and analysis of cancer stem cells (CSCs), rare cells believed to be directly involved in propagating cancers.
- George Mason U Receives Grant To Deploy Intergraph Apps for Intelligence Curriculum
George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA has been awarded a grant from Intergraph to enable students enrolled in GMU's Geospatial Intelligence Graduate Certificate program to use the company's geospatial production and exploitation software as part of their core curriculum.
- Institute for Cyber Security at U Texas, San Antonio Opens Incubator
The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) has launched a new Internet security incubator. The incubator was developed to commercialize promising technologies that address major cyber security and privacy issues. The first companies to enter the incubator are Denim Labs and SafeMashups.
- ISO/IEC Publishes Office Open XML Standard
ISO/IEC has published the Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standard, formally known as ISO/IEC 29500:2008. It describes file formats originally designed by Microsoft for its Office 2007 productivity suite, which are used in presentation, spreadsheet and word processing applications.
- Dynamics NAV 2009 ERP Coming Next Month
Microsoft exec Kirill Tatarinov Wednesday described some new features to expect in the forthcoming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 enterprise resource planning solution. He gave the keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2008 event in Copenhagen, Denmark.
