Link:
http://en.wikipedia....ki/Storm_botnet
Summary:
The Storm botnet or Storm worm botnet is a group of "zombie" computers (or "botnet") that has been linked by the Storm Worm, a Trojan horse that has spread through e-mail spam, and is controlled remotely. The Storm botnet was estimated in September 2007 to be running on anywhere from 1 million to 50 million computer systems.[1][2] Other sources have placed the size of the botnet to be around 250,000 to 1 million compromised systems. One network security analyst claims to have developed software that has crawled the botnet and estimates its control of only 160,000 infected computers.[3] The Storm botnet was first identified around January 2007, with the Storm worm at one point accounting for 8% of all malware on Microsoft Windows computers.[4]
The botnet reportedly is powerful enough as of September 2007 to force entire countries off the Internet, and is estimated to be capable of executing more instructions per second than some of the world's top supercomputers.[5] However, it is not a completely accurate comparison, according to security analyst James Turner, who said that comparing a botnet and a supercomputer is like comparing an army of snipers to a nuclear weapon.[6] Bradley Anstis, of the United Kingdom security firm Marshal, said, "The more worrying thing is bandwidth. Just calculate four million times a standard ADSL connection. That's a lot of bandwidth. It's quite worrying. Having resources like that at their disposal—distributed around the world with a high presence and in a lot of countries—means they can deliver very effective distributed attacks against hosts."[6]
