Storm Worm botnet cracked wide open

January 9, 2009 – 1:23 PM

A team of researchers from Bonn University and RWTH Aachen University have analysed the notorious Storm Worm botnet, and concluded it certainly isn’t as invulnerable as it once seemed. Quite the reverse, for in theory it can be rapidly eliminated using software developed and at least partially disclosed by Georg Wicherski, Tillmann Werner, Felix Leder and Mark Schlösser. However it seems in practice the elimination process would fall foul of the law.

Over the last two years, Storm Worm has demonstrated how easily organised internet criminals have been able to spread this infection. During that period, the Storm Worm botnet has accumulated more than a million infected computers, known as drones or zombies, obeying the commands of a control server and using peer-to-peer techniques to locate new servers. Even following a big clean-up with Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool, around 100,000 drones probably still remain. That means the Storm Worm botnet is responsible for a considerable share of the Spam tsunami and for many distributed denial-of-service attacks. It’s astonishing that no one has succeeded in dismantling the network, but these researchers say it isn’t due to technical finesse on the part of the Storm Worm’s developers.

Existing knowledge of the techniques used by the Storm Worm has mainly been obtained by observing the behaviour of infected systems, but the researchers took a different approach to disarm it. They reverse translated large parts of the machine code of the drone client program and analysed it, taking a particularly close look at the functions for communications between drones and with the server.

Source:
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/Storm-Worm-botnet-cracked-wide-open–/112385