Amazing enough, social engineering works — and it manages to dupe ordinary users into clicking on links which masquerade as legitimate content — fake greeting cards, holiday greetings, etc.

And people keep on clicking on them.

Why should cyber criminals try harder when there is so much “low hanging fruit”?

Of course, that’s a rhetorical question.

But having said that, the Storm botnet is an amazing example of social engineering prowess — how people can be suckered into clicking on anything, and unfortunately, allow criminals manage to steal their login IDs, their credit card credentials, and remotely control & use their PCs for various other nefarious purposes.

The good folks over at the German HoneyNet Project have some interesting statistics which indicate that, due to renewed efforts over the course of the Christmas and New Year’s holiday, the puppet masters controlling the Storm Botnet managed to increase the Storm Botnet size by more than 200%.

These numbers also reflect the increases we have also seen in Storm “seeding” activity over the holidays, and this translates into an increasing number of detections.

But given that the newest iterations of Storm includes (and revolves around) a new promulgation of a rootkit component, it can be somewhat difficult to ascertain specific detection numbers.

Forget about what you may have heard in the popular trade press about other botnets — the Storm Botnet network is proving to be the “Energizer Bunny” of botnets.

It keeps going, and going, and going, and… unfortunately, users keep on allowing themselves to fall prey to these tactics.

Social engineering continues to be a major, major threat vector.

No worries — we’re staying vigilant, ensuring that our customers remain protected.

Paul “Fergie” Ferguson,
Network Security Intelligence,
Advanced Threats Research

Image source: Moritz Steiner, Honeyblog.org