The Storm botnet or Storm Worm botnet (also known as Dorf botnet and Ecard malware) was a remotely controlled network of "zombie" computers (or "botnet") that had been linked by the Storm Worm, a Trojan horse spread through e-mail spam. At its height in September 2007, the Storm botnet was running on anywhere from 1 million to 50 million computer systems, and accounted for 8% of all malware on Microsoft Windows computers. It was first identified around January 2007, having been distributed by email with subjects such as "230 dead as storm batters Europe," giving it its well-known name. The botnet began to decline in late 2007, and by mid-2008 had been reduced to infecting about 85,000 computers, far less than it had infected a year earlier. As of December 2012, the original creators of Storm have not been found. The Storm botnet has displayed defensive behaviors that indicated that its controllers were actively protecting the botnet against attempts at tracking and disabling it, by specifically attacking the online operations of some security vendors and researchers who had attempted to investigate it. Security expert Joe Stewart revealed that in late 2007, the operators of the botnet began to further decentralize their operations, in possible plans to sell portions of the Storm botnet to other operators. It was reportedly powerful enough to force entire countries off the Internet, and was estimated to be capable of executing more instructions per second than some of the world's top supercomputers. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation considered the botnet a major risk to increased bank fraud, identity theft, and other cybercrimes.
Origins First detected on the Internet in January 2007, the Storm botnet and worm are so-called because of the storm-related subject lines its infectious e-mail employed initially, such as "230 dead as storm batters Europe." Later provocative subjects included "Chinese missile shot down USA aircraft," and "U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has kicked German Chancellor Angela Merkel." It is suspected by some information security professionals that well-known fugitive spammers, including Leo Kuvayev, may have been involved in the operation and control of the Storm botnet. According to technology journalist Daniel Tynan, writing under his "Robert X. Cringely" pseudonym, a great portion of the fault for the existence of the Storm botnet lay with Microsoft and Adobe Systems. Other sources state that Storm Worm's primary method of victim acquisition was through enticing users via frequently changing social engineering (confidence trickery) schemes. According to Patrick Runald, the Storm botnet had a strong American focus, and likely had agents working to support it within the United States. Some experts, however, believe the Storm botnet controllers were Russian, some pointing specifically at the Russian Business Network, citing that the Storm software mentions a hatred of the Moscow-based security firm Kaspersky Lab, and includes the Russian word "buldozhka," which means "bulldog."
Composition The botnet, or zombie network, comprises computers running Microsoft Windows as their operating system. Once infected, a computer becomes known as a bot. This bot then performs automated tasks—anything from gathering data on the user, to attacking web sites, to forwarding infected e-mail—without its owner's knowledge or permission. Estimates indicate that 5,000 to 6,000 computers are dedicated to propagating the spread of the worm through the use of e-mails with infected attachments; 1.2 billion virus messages have been sent by the botnet through September 2007, including a record 57 million on August 22, 2007 alone. Lawrence Baldwin, a computer forensics specialist, was quoted as saying, "Cumulatively, Storm is sending billions of messages a day. It could be double digits in the billions, easily." One of the methods used to entice victims to infection-hosting web sites are offers of free music, from artists such as Beyoncé Knowles, Kelly Clarkson, Rihanna, The Eagles, Foo Fighters, R. Kelly, and Velvet Revolver. Signature-based detection, the main defense of most computer systems against virus and malware infections, is hampered by the large number of Storm variants. Back-end servers that control the spread of the botnet and Storm worm automatically re-encode their distributed infection software twice an hour, for new transmissions, making it difficult for anti-virus vendors to stop the virus and infection spread. Additionally, the location of the remote servers which control the botnet are hidden behind a constantly changing DNS technique called 'fast flux', making it difficult to find and stop virus hosting sites and mail servers. In short, the name and location of such machines are frequently changed and rotated, often on a minute by minute basis. The Storm botnet's operators control the system via peer-to-peer techniques, making external monitoring and disabling of the system more difficult. There is no central "command-and-control point" in the Storm botnet that can be shut down. The botnet also makes use of encrypted traffic. Efforts to infect computers usually revolve around convincing people to download e-mail attachments which contain the virus through subtle manipulation. In one instance, the botnet's controllers took advantage of the National Football League's opening weekend, sending out mail offering "football tracking programs" which did nothing more than infect a user's computer. According to Matt Sergeant, chief anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs, "In terms of power, [the botnet] utterly blows the supercomputers away. If you add up all 500 of the top supercomputers, it blows them all away with just 2 million of its machines. It's very frightening that criminals have access to that much computing power, but there's not much we can do about it." It is estimated that only 10 –20% of the total capacity and power of the Storm botnet is currently being used. Computer security expert Joe Stewart detailed the process by which compromised machines join the botnet: attempts to join the botnet are made by launching a series of EXE files on the compromised machine, in stages. Usually, they are named in a sequence from game0.exe through game5.exe, or similar. It will then continue launching executables in turn. They typically perform the following:
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