Storm Worm botnet up for sale

The Storm worm botnet - responsible for plenty of global IT misery - seems to be getting chopped up for sale to cyber-dodgies.

Joe Stewart, a blogger at security specialist SecureWorks and expert on Storm, says the new variants are using a 40-byte key to encrypt their Overnet peer-to-peer traffic.

Each node can only communicate with nodes using the same key.

This, he wrote in a blog today, allows the Storm author to divide the botnet into smaller networks.

Stewart believes that this could be move towards selling Storm to other spammers as an 'end-to-end spam botnet system, complete with fast-flux DNS and hosting capabilities'.