Spam-spitting Storm virus, a year old, tricky as ever

USA TODAY, November, 2007 by Jon Swartz

SAN FRANCISCO -- One of the nastiest -- and most persistent -- sources of spam just turned a year old.

Since it touched down in e-mail inboxes, the Storm virus has infected at least 1 million PCs worldwide and is responsible for billions of spam messages. Since July, e-mail management company Postini alone has blocked nearly 1.5 billion copies of Storm. (Before Storm hit, Postini blocked about 1 million tainted e-mail messages a day.)

And anti-spam experts expect even more rumblings during the holidays. They predict Storm -- which is spread largely through virus-infected PCs -- will set record volumes by the end of the year, including up to 500 million messages during the holiday season.

"There does not seem to be any let-up in sight," says Adam Swidler, a senior manager at Postini, a subsidiary of Google. "Storm is perfectly capable of virtually unlimited mutations."

The chameleon-like ...