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September 10th, 2007, 11:03 GMT · By Alexandru Dumitru

Storm Virus Reminds Us of Skynet

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Storm is going to be a legend, even after it'll go down. I'll tell my grandchildren about it. It's one huge threat and now it's acting like the viruses from the movies. Do you remember "Terminator", starring Arnold Schwarzenegger? Skynet was a sort of computer virus that took over everything
and started controlling everyone, attacking all those who opposed it. But that was just a movie, wasn't it? Well, let's just take a look at Storm:

It has infected millions of computers (some say that up to 50 mil.) so it's widespread. Hackers using it control a botnet with a huge computing power. More and more machines get infected daily and recently I found out that it struck those who dared to fight it. And it's not getting any weaker. Do you see the Storm - Skynet resemblance now?

Anyway, the botnet has conducted distributed denial of service attacks against several anti-spam sites (such as 419 eater, Scamwarners and AA419 which stands for Artists Against 419). The botnet does several things by its own, such as infecting computers and sending more spam, but the attack has been hacker directed, so it does not have full autonomy. I'm just being paranoid and I've probably seen too many movies, but can hackers develop this virus up to such an extent that it will have a complex AI? I'm not sure if that is possible, since I'm not much into virus scripting, but if that ever happens, we'll just switch to Linux, because Storm only affects Windows.

So, if you try to fight Storm, it will get back at you, with full force. And these attacks show that it has great strength and that it will not be stopped soon. I really wonder how they are going to take down such a tough infection that affected so many computers.
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