Storm Worm hits 1.6 mln PCs

The so-called Storm Worm has evolved into a worldwide ploy to build armies of botnets to send mass spam, SC Magazine UK reports.

The malware dubbed Peacomm and Pecoan began spreading last Thursday as an attachment, claiming to have video of last week’s deadly European wind storm.

It now arrives in inboxes with a romantic subject containing different file names and is using Port 7871 to communicate with IP addresses once it infects a machine, researchers said. The new variants also include rootkit technologies to hide their presence.

The Trojan has infected at least 1.6 million PCs. The May 2005 Sober worm was the last time researchers saw a threat spread with such explosiveness.

Home users are much more likely to be infected than those in the enterprise because most corporate anti-spam and firewall solutions strip attachments at the gateway, experts said.