It looks like the Storm worm has been a great success. This is the official opinion of the 2007 Global Threat Report from security firm ESET.The social engineering tactics used over the past 12 months and the duration of the methods represented the concern of the report.
According to ESET, in order to help propagation and infection, malware authors supervised the efficacy of every strategy.
Andrew Lee, chief research officer at ESET, declared that Storm is "a modern threat that uses advanced technology to infect PCs and maintain its foothold on compromised systems by any means available".
Those who programmed it and the bot-masters are tying to keep the botnet and release "frequent updates to evade detection by anti-malware and intrusion detection systems."
Storm’s complicated structure and self-updating mechanism is given by the fact that it uses distinct names for its components.
There weren’t aimed only the computers running Microsoft's Windows, but, as the Global Threat Report observed, Apple machines running Mac OS X also.Although the malware attack targeting OS X resembled W32/Zlob, the Windows malware was to take into consideration.
In 2007, complex threats represented a challenge but, older types of malware – like mass mailers –, must be remembered.
During 1 January to 10 December period, ESET supervised 4,251 million emails and discovered that 33.8 million held either a malware attachment or a link to a website having malicious code.
A malware from 2006, resembling Win32/Stration.XW (aka Warezov or Stration), is the most common; it brings unsolicited emails and it can be presented as an attachment which attempts to pass through undiscovered: it appears like a normal text file and changes its icon.
ESET announced that MSN Messenger or Skype were used by variants of Stration as a way of transmitting itself.
