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January 9, 2008
Nugache Overhauled, Overtaking Storm Worm?
I recently read "A Fire Upon the Deep," so the notion that we might have multiple enormous botnets roaming the 'net, slowly working toward some transcendent state, tickles me ever so slightly. In this case, it looks like Nugache, which didn't appear to have the legs Storm did, has helped itself to some of Storm's tricks and techniques.
"An upgraded spam-blasting worm could be poised to surpass the durable Storm worm as the nastiest botnet on the Internet. Or not. Therein lies the uncertainty of predicting how malware evolves.
"The worm, called Nugache, has been around since before Storm. However, Nugache never proved particularly powerful or widespread.
"In recent weeks, however, malware researcher Secure Computing noticed that Nugache has been revised and updated, making it as powerful as Storm in many ways.
And there are some market considerations at work, evidently:
"Despite concerted efforts to eradicate it, Storm has hung on. What may be helping Nugache's rise is that the operators of the Storm worm seem to be reducing its size and selling off chunks of it to spammers, thus breaking it up.
"Nugache's operators, meanwhile, are filling the void by massively undercutting Storm's prices, according to Secure Computing."
(Link)
Posted by mhall at 5:34 PM | Add Comment
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