worms

What good are several million Storm worm infected PCs? According to one researcher, the current computing power of Storm worm's botnet is greater than IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer. "If you calculate pure theoretical throughput," Matt Sergeant, chief antispam technologist with security vendor MessageLabs, "then I'm sure the botnet has more capacity than IBM's Blue Gene. If you sat them down to play chess, the botnet would win."

The Australian publication IT News also quotes Sergeant as saying, "In terms of power, the botnet utterly blows the supercomputers away." He goes … Read more

Elise's malware situation is frightening, but it's not as scary as her father, whose closet quest for pornography and reckless viewing methods pile more and more adware onto Elise's personal PC. She confronts him when a PC repair tech reveals the truth of the infection. Things get ugly. Threats fly.

16-year-old Elise is left with a challenge: How do you confront someone whose user behavior is dangerous to your computer and family privacy--and whose real-life behavior is dangerous to you? This week's Spyware Horror Story, Vicious voyeur, may hold some clues.

Visit our Spyware Horror Story archives … Read more

William is philosophizing to his toothbrush one minute and contemplating practicing shot put with his computer the next. What burst his bubble?

William blames a virus, and in his tussle with the malignant malware, he learns a few lessons about the risks of sharing a computer with family and friends. But was it actually a virus that got him, and are the lessons he learned the right ones?

After the frustrations of dealing with damaged data, it's easy to generalize about past and future behavior. Set the record straight in a thrilling malware true-and-false in this week's Spyware … Read more

It's unsettling to think of malware as cutting-edge technology, but its trickery has evolved alongside Internet trends like instant-messaging services Yahoo Messenger and AIM. Chris discovered this relationship when he clicked a faux-photo link in an IM message, letting loose a worm that instantly hijacked his buddy list. Would his friends now think he was perpetrating malware?

Find out Chris' defense and get the lowdown on IM spam (also called "spim") in this week's Spyware Horror Story.

Security vendor Websense is reporting the return of a bogus Better Business Bureau e-mail. The attached Word document in this release contains a Trojan that, when opened, attempts to download and install a keylogger which then uploads stolen data from the compromised PC to an IP address located in Malaysia.

In March, the Better Business Bureau issued a warning. The new bogus message claims that a complaint has been filed against the recipient's company. Attached to the message is a Microsoft Word document (Document_for_Case.doc), supposedly containing additional details regarding the complaint.

Heard the one about the Skype worm? Actually, users of the popular VoIP service Skype have been contending with misleading and dangerous URLs for some time. Like worms spread by MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, various Skype worms have been known to include a message such as "Give me your opinion" followed by a URL. Clicking the link then installs several malicious files including versions of the Warezov/Stration Trojan horse. Stration has been known to open remote access on infected machines.

Now, Chris Boyd, Director of Malware Research at Facetime Security Labs, has found a recent Skype … Read more