Worst Virus Attack in 2 Years

Written by Barracuda Technician

In the largest sustained virus attack in the last two years, more than 200 million spam emails have been sent in a little more than a week directing users to malware-plagued sites hosting the Storm worm virus, according to Postini. The emails did not have embedded viruses in their attachments, but instead contained a link to the malicious Web site where servers have a generic downloader that reinforces the hackers' botnets. Postini tracked 42 million Storm-related emails on the first day of the attack, and an average of 4 million to 6 million on subsequent days. Postini's Adam Swidler says the threats are "designed to add computers to the botnet" or to make computers vulnerable for infection later. Paul Henry of Secure Computing says the Storm authors are also responsible for e-card attacks that first appeared last December and began again in early July. Like the Storm worm attacks, the e-card attack attempts to install rootkits in unsuspecting computers for use in botnets. Postini says that on average, around 1 million infected emails are tracked daily.