As the Storm worm grows into a prolonged online siege 10 times larger than any other e-mail attack in the last two years -- amassing a botnet of nearly 2 million computers -- researchers worry about the damage hackers could wreak if they unleash a denial-of-service attack with it.
Between July 16 and Aug. 1, researchers at software security firm Postini have recorded 415 million spam e-mails luring users to malicious Web sites, according to Adam Swidler, a senior manager with Postini. Before the Storm worm began its attack, an average day sees about 1 million virus-laden e-mails crossing the Internet. On July 19, Postini recorded 48.6 million and on July 24, researchers tracked 46.2 million malicious messages -- more than 99% of them are from the Storm worm.
Researchers at SecureWorks are seeing similar staggering numbers, as well.
Most of these bots are most likely careless or ignorant internet users. Even if 99% of all internet users used common sense
security practices, one percent would be roughly 11 million computers/users (using 1,114,274,426 total users from internet world stats).