Storm Worm Stalkers Share Research

Secure Computing has created Storm Tracker as part of its TrustedSource Web portal to provide the latest information about the storm worm to IT professionals.

Storm worm – two words that continue to brew up agita among IT professionals as it stalked vulnerable computers across the Internet. Now officials at Secure Computing have created a special section on their Web-based research portal dedicated to providing the public with up-to-date information on it.

Dubbed Storm Tracker, the section offers a real-time view into information about IPs and domains associated with Storm. The service was launched this week to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Storm worm’s appearance.

“Storm, without question, has been the most innovative and adaptive worm of 2007,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, principal research scientist at Secure Computing’s TrustedSource Labs.

First detected in January 2007, the Storm botnet and worm earned their names because of the storm-related subject lines its early rounds of infectious emails, such as "230 dead as storm batters Europe". Starting out as spam, the creators moved on to denial of service attacks and most recently, phishing. Just last week, a number of security researchers discovered phishers posing as Barclays Bank and the Halifax unit of the National Bank of Scotland were using the botnet to send fake messages to unwary users.