Storm Worm Now Just a Squall

Found on PC World on Saturday, 20 October 2007
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Brandon Enright, a network security analyst at UC San Diego, has been tracking Storm since July and said that, despite the intense publicity that the network of infected computers has received, it's actually been shrinking steadily and is presently a shadow of its former self.

In July, for example, he said that Storm appeared to have infected about 1.5 million PCs, about 200,000 of which were accessible at any given time.

Enright guessed that a total of about 15 million PCs have been infected by Storm in the nine months it has been around, although the vast majority of those have been cleaned up and are no longer part of the Storm network.

Lately Storm has been responsible for a large quantity of "pump and dump" spam, which tries to temporarily boost the price of penny stocks.

Stories like this one point out how effective spam actually is. If you ask everybody you know about spam, they would tell you how annoying and stupid it is. Yet, you can make so much money with it that people put a lot of effort into keeping it running.