Storm Worm sent 15 million pump-and-dump e-mails
The Storm Worm botnet network may be shrinking in size, but it has managed to send out 15 million of those annoying audio spam messages in October, according to anti-spam vendor MessageLabs. — It's hard to believe that the Storm messages were effective.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after Security Fix estimated that the Storm Worm botnet out-computed the world's top supercomputers, MessageLabs puts a commercial number on what all that capacity does: 15 million pump-and-dump audio spam messages pushed out in October alone. That MessageLabs' own intelligence report carried the finding signals how central anti-spam telemetry has become to sizing botnet activity.
The interesting wrinkle is the tension inside MessageLabs' own data — confirmed volume alongside a rumored shrinkage of the network itself. If both hold, each remaining bot is working harder, which points to an operation optimizing revenue per infected machine rather than raw reach.
First-order effects
- Mailboxes and corporate gateways absorb 15 million audio-format messages this month, forcing MessageLabs and rival filters to detect spam embedded in sound files rather than text, where keyword rules are useless.
- The thinly traded stocks named in the messages face artificial trading pressure from any recipient who buys, which is the entire point of the pump half of pump-and-dump.
Second-order effects
- Because audio spam defeats content filters, enterprises respond with volume- and reputation-based filtering, shifting anti-spam spend toward behavioral detection vendors and raising MessageLabs' profile as the measurement source for botnet output.
- Pump-and-dump economics — tiny conversion rates multiplied across tens of millions of sends — invite copycat operators onto compromised machines, tightening demand in the malware-infection supply chain that builds botnets.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, botnets consolidate around monetizable fraud workloads like stock promotion rather than indiscriminate nuisance spam, making infected-host markets an economic problem for regulators and exchanges, not just an inbox problem for IT departments.
The trend: Botnets are evolving from raw-scale nuisance networks into measured, monetization-driven spam platforms whose output is tracked by anti-spam vendors the way analysts track ad networks.