[pchelpers] Article:Guessing at compromised host numbers

The fine art of pulling numbers from your nether regions
By Sûnnet Beskerming
Published Tuesday 25th September 2007 18:45 GMT


After much waiting by end users, and a lot of hoping from interested
Information Security watchers, Microsoft has finally added detection for
the Storm Trojan (Nuwar, Zhelatin, etc) to its Malicious Software
Removal Tool. The most recent update, released on September 11th,
included detection for this malicious software, and the early results
are not quite what most people were expecting.

With various claims being made that there are millions upon millions of
compromised hosts that make up the available network that the botnet
controllers have access to, it would be assumed that the Microsoft
Malicious Software Removal Tool should be removing a large number of
affected systems from the Internet.

That isn't quite what Microsoft found. In a post to its TechNet blog,
Microsoft's Anti-Malware team discovered that the total number of Storm
Trojan removals placed it third in the overall list of malware variants
removed from the systems of end users. With more than 660,000 removals
each, Renos and Zlob malware types led the Nuwar / Storm family of
malware. Nuwar variants, and components of Nuwar were successfully
removed from just under a quarter of a million systems.

More here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/25/microsoft_malicious_software_removal_tool/
-- 
John Durham
Site http://modecideas.com
Server hosted on Ubuntu 4.10
Good advice is like good paint. It only works when applied.



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