Over the past weeks persistent warnings have been issued linked to a puzzling bot-creation system called Nugache, which for many announces a second Storm.
Some of its features offer enough reasons for concern such as its P2P design which implies the lack of IRC channel as a bot system. The absence of IRC channel which is basically used for command and control makes tracking and blocking very difficult. Its stealthiness and sneakiness are nothing but remarkable and its activity is amazingly concealed due to a high degree of encryption.
Nugache, which was a 2006 discovery, is regarded by some as a malware-launching environment with great “potential” to rule the malware business in 2008. Similarly to Storm, its purpose is not too obvious.
It is rather difficult not to get wary when seeing how Nugache can act so variously as a bot or an Internet worm, with Trojan feature. Its applications can be quite numerous. The recent ado about Nugache has raised some questions about its increasing notoriety and about how related are the two actually.
As TechWorld reveals, one security firm, Secure Computing, has commented upon a certain conflict over price between the two now important names in spam business – Storm and Nugache as the latter might have deprived the former of some business opportunities. However, both Storm and Nugache can only mean bad news for this year as they are both clever, well engineered “systems”.
Apparently, though technically speaking Nugache is not very likely to be superior to Storm for example, it has the economic concern issue on its side because it is cheaper. Anyway, 2008 sure does look like a future malware battlefield and we certainly hope for some technological “back ups”. Nugache and Storm have launched the challenge.
