Limelight kills botnets better than cops do

Botnet operators have become public enemy number-one as consumers, businesses and governments fall foul to identity theft, DDoS attacks and spam. Yet no one appears to be able to stop the spread of bots -- except maybe the media.

After a year in the limelight, it appears the operators behind the Storm worm botnet have shut-up shop or are laying low. Well, for now at least.

At the height of its rein, Storm was the top spammer in the world, responsible for around 21 percent of all spam. As 70 percent of all spam is generated by botnets, this is pretty good reach when you consider that as many as five million machines were under its control. But they were the good old days for Storm. Now, according to Bradley Anstis of Marshal security, Storm accounts for just two percent of the spam the company captures.

So what has caused this? Why has Storm become a shell of its old self? Was it AV vendors improving their software to stop the spread of malware used to harvest bots? Was it the police cracking down on botnet operators that has caused Storm's owners to duck for cover? Did the ISPs suddenly decide to protect us with clean pipes? Or was it you, reader, creating a groundswell of interest in the botnet operator's activities that caused them to shrivel?