Blogger fights back against the storm worm

Since Blogger has been kind enough to host this blog for about two years now, I thought I should do a post about the recent reports concerning malware and Blogger.

Blogger itself, wasn't compromised, but a lot of bloggers individual blogs were. Most people are compromised by malware after clicking on a link they shouldn't have.

This was posted on Blogger Buzz:

You may have seen stories in the news recently about malware on Blogger, such has this one from the BBC or this one from Committee to Protect Bloggers. Blogger was not compromised. Instead, the blog posts are from bloggers whose machines were compromised by a Trojan horse.

These bloggers had their mail2blogger email addresses in their computers' address books (a perfectly legitimate use case), so when the malicious software spammed every address in their address book with its content, a copy of that email was posted to their blog.

We are in the process of notifying impacted bloggers and recommending that they scan their computers and run current anti-virus software, available in the GooglePack. This is also good advice for all computer users, especially those who may have clicked the links in the emails sent by the virus. For more information about computer security, check out upenn.edu and us-cert.gov.

The BBC article mentions that Alex Eckelberry, who blogs at the Sunbelt blog was the first to discover the problem on Blogger. Please note, Alex himself is a Blogger user and the CEO of Sunbelt Software, a computer security company.

Alex has even been kind enough to help me, when I ran into a problem, or two doing this blog.

Alex has a pretty visual post (lot's of screenshots), which show exactly how the worm would be encountered in the wild.

Of interest, Alex also discovered that Blogger wasn't the only place, where people are being lured into downloading the storm worm.

From what I understand the intent of the storm worm is to turn a computer into a zombie, which becomes part of a botnet. Botnets are networks of zombie computers.

Botnets are used to send out spam e-mail and sometimes attack other systems in what are known as DOS (denial of service) attacks. They are also used to commit click fraud.

Of note, most Internet fraud can be traced to a spam e-mail.

Besides running a scan with good anti-virus software (to see if you've been compromised) -- the best defense is to learn how to spot the lures that are designed to trick people into clicking on them. In most instances, this will stop the problem before it happens!