Researchers Hijack Storm Worm to Track Profits (Washington Post)

The Washington Post covers an interesting research project which involved taking over parts of the Storm Worm botnet to send out specially modified spam. It looks like a sort of white-hat phishing expedition. "According to their research, about ten percent of those who clicked on the link designed to spread the malware ended up running and installing the malware. Again, extrapolating out from their limited access to the Storm botnet, the researchers concluded: 'By the same logic, we estimate that Storm self-propagation campaigns can produce between 3,500 and 8,500 new bots per day.'" The full paper is available.

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