storm worms family tree

The Storm Worm's Family Tree

Brian Krebs writes on Security Fix:

New research suggests that the infamous Storm worm has its roots in

a computer worm that first surfaced as early as 2004,

two-and-a-half years prior to Storm's widely-recognized birthday.

The findings come from security researchers at Damballa, a start-up

in Atlanta that monitors activity from botnets, large groupings of

hacked, remotely-controlled computers that criminals use for

spamming and other online illegal activity.

According to the researchers, Storm was born from the ashes of the

"Bobax worm," one of the most successful botnet-related computer

worms of the past few years. Bobax spread by exploiting various

vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system, and

turned infected machines into spam-spewing zombies. By early 2005,

Bobax had spread to hundreds of thousands of PCs, after a highly

successful spam campaign that used infected e-mail attachments

disguised as pictures purportedly showing Saddam Hussein or Osama

Bin Laden captured or dead.