Storm Worm surpasses Sober as most prolific email virus of all time
Posted
Thursday, August 23, 2007 4:37 PM
by
hwaldron
The storm worm was named after it's social engineering attempt to capitalize on one of the greatest Winter storms of all time in Europe during early 2007. Folks were invited to click on breaking news items and with the new e-card variants the Nuwar worm has grown to become the most significant email virus of all time (both in terms of email volume and malicious capabilities) 
Record-breaking 'Storm' linked to spam surge
Biggest, baddest e-mail malware ever, says researcher
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9030538
QUOTE: August 14, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Storm, the Trojan horse that collects PCs into hacker-controlled botnets, roared back into life last month in several waves, security researchers said Monday, and has blown by 2005's Sober to become the most prolific e-mail-borne malware ever.
"This is the biggest since Sober in mid-to-late 2005," said Sam Masiello, director of threat research at MX Logic Inc., referring to a long-lasting worm whose variants struck repeatedly in the second half of 2005, often in extremely high numbers. In November 2006, for instance, e-mail filtering companies reported malware-laden e-mail counts spiking 1,500% in a week, and said they were intercepting four times the usual number of infected messages.
According to MX Logic, Storm -- a bot Trojan that collects compromised computers into large networks of ready-to-use PCs -- has broken Sober's records. Thanks to Storm, the Englewood, Colo.-based managed e-mail security vendor tracked a July jump in malicious e-mail of 1,700% over June. Storm, however, is much more malevolent than Sober ever dreamed. "Not only is it designed to propagate more copies of Storm, but it releases huge quantities of spam," said Masiello.