Storm Worm Strikes Again - and Blasts from the Past, Part 1

Storm Worm Prepares to Rings Out 2007...

UK's the Register website reports that the Storm Worm, which first surfaced in January 2007, has been making the rounds again, first with email messages sent out on December 24th containing links to scantily clad young women in Santa Claus suits, and since then with messages directing users to a malicious website called uhavepostcard.com.

...Just as It Rung In 2007

How bad is the Storm Worm? While the Storm Worm (so named because its original version used the subject line '230 dead as storm batters Europe'), points users to various fake websites for various types of downloads, the malware is always some variant of the Small.DAM Trojan. Small.DAM installs the wincom32 service and turns the computer into a member of a botnet network that can send thousands of emails in a few minutes. The Wikipedia entry for Storm Worm contains plenty of references to its history and variants.

Calming the 'Storm'

Stop the Storm Worm by using up-to-date antivirus and antimalware programs, and remind your less technically-adept friends and families that Santa Claus doesn't encourage naughty behavior and that 'free' postcard messages from unfamiliar servers always have a high cost.

My Favorite Blog Posts from 2007, Numbers 10-7

Here are my favorite 'blasts from the past' from 2007: the blog posts that gathered lots of diggs and/or comments while shedding more light on difficult subjects.

• 10. Vista's User Account Control 'Nags' Are Useful – Believe It or Not This story from May 10 pointed out some of the hidden benefits of Vista's User Account Control feature, garnering 8 diggs in the process.
• 9. Microsoft Patch Tuesday Knocks Out Skype - What Can We Learn From This? With millions of users (not to mention Maximum PC's podcast) affected by VoIP provider Skype's outage in August, there were plenty of users asking "what happened?" As a result of the comments on this story, I dug deeper, resulting in my next nominee:
• 8. Skype to Users: Microsoft Good, My Bad, We Fixed, All Better Now My investigation of exactly how Skype works (it combines peer-to-peer and distributed network features) also garnered a lot of comments and concerns from readers.
• 7. Use a Sony USB Fingerprint Reader and Thumbdrive, Get a Rootkit Free! I wasn't the only one who was shocked to see that Sony was up to its old tricks again with this story from August. It gathered 5 diggs as well as a bunch of comments from readers. See page 2 to read my proposed "Bill of Rootkit Rights," designed to promote transparency and honesty about rootkits. With some versions of the Storm Worm using rootkit techniques to hide themselves, it may be time to review this story again. Next time, numbers 6-4.

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