Your Computer May be Part of The Largest Supercomputer System in the World - for the Bad Guys!

In an article on iTnews, its being reported that the number of PCs that are now part of the Storm-worm botnet is large enough that its combined power easily overtops the power of the biggest supercomputers.

I'll make the observation that at the levels they're talking about - 5-10 million PCs - the network bandwidth alone is more than any single supercomputer could possibly have. Another article today on Slashdot is noting that the botnet is attacking many anti-scammer sites such as 419eater, Scamwarners, Artists Against 419 and others.


The "owners" of this botnet is cagy, seldom showing the full abilities of their creation, using only 10% or so for most attacks and spam torrents up to now, but the iTnews article notes that they've seen spikes where 5-10 times this many have been used - pointing to the potential that the botnet is as many as 50 million computers strong.

What this means to you is that your computer may be infected and part of this net, and not typically show any signs such as a network slowdown or slow response to the keyboard - yet it may wait in the background for the botmaster to tell it to start spamming or doing a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack for minutes or hours at a time.

I went looking for an easy (and cheap/free) way of checking for and removing this scourge - and found that Google Pack offers the "Starter Edition" of Spyware Doctor free as part of its offerings. And of course my favourite, Spybot-Search&Destroy is free (donations gratefully accepted and well worth it in my opinion)

Both these (and other) packages will find the Storm Worm load and other spyware/bot-net software.

Of course your computer won't get infected if you don't visit any of the sites that the Worm sends you in their spam mail - or visit any new and un-tried blog topics and such. The latter is the most difficult to guard against as the Worm Hearders have been busy subverting all manner of "freely" offered blog areas including several major ones - and the Worm itself is starting to tag along when you post to a blog, adding its own little comments and links to your posting - a sure way to know your PC is infected according to Security Watch

The only way we'll stamp out this massive PC infection is one PC at a time - make sure you have the latest detection software on your system and run a sweep regularly. Don't rely on the automated process to catch it - this and other infections sometimes disable the automatic sweeps - and even delete the whole programs.

Only by being proactive in this can we ever hope to put an oak stake through the heart of THE WORM.