Storm: Holiday Boost
The picture illustrates the success rate of the botnet: The x-axis shows the date, starting a few days before Christmas and ending today. The y-axis represents the number of infected machines within Stormnet, the “encrypted” part of the botnet in which the actual communication is XORed with a 40 byte key. As you can see, the first days before Christmas the size of the botnet was around 5-14 thousand infected machines. However, just around Christmas the size grows again due to successful infections and new victims which fell for the social engineering mails. For now, the botnet has peaked at about 40 thousand infected machines being online at a time.
-Shlok
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