This report also identifies a number of ways in which malware is being used to infect host PCs to bypass security software. These methods include:
The botnets examined in the report are unique in that they tied spam campaigns to current events or websites of interest, using a blend of email and the web to propagate. Additionally, these decentralized and highly coordinated attacks enabled a variety of Internet assaults, from email and blog spam to phishing, instant messaging (IM) attacks and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Storm malware was the first of this trend of sophisticated social engineering, affecting a cumulative 40 million computers around the world between January 2007 and February 2008, according to IronPort researchers.
