Storm worm strikes back if researchers attempt to discover its origin
Posted
Thursday, October 25, 2007 4:42 PM
by
hwaldron
The Storm worm botnet is so well protected that it's central servers and malware authors have remained anonymous. While it uses fast-flux servers that are ever changing, the Storm worm client can launch a DDoS based attack if researchers try to reverse engineer the code to determine how it works.
Storm worm strikes back if researchers attempt to discover its origin
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/102407-storm-worm-security.html
The Storm worm is fighting back against security researchers that seek to destroy it and has them running scared, Interop New York show attendees heard Tuesday. The worm can figure out which users are trying to probe its command-and-control servers, and it retaliates by launching DDoS attacks against them, shutting down their Internet access for days, says Josh Corman, host-protection architect for IBM/ISS, who led a session on network threats.
A recently discovered capability of Storm is its ability to interrupt applications as they boot up and either shut them down or allow them to appear to boot, but disable them. Users will see that, say, antivirus is turned on, but it isn’t scan for viruses, or as Corman puts it, it is brain-dead. "It’s running, but it’s not doing anything.