Storm Worm Siege Escalates

[Humpty]

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.

Article

[Pfipps]

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).