Storm Worm Virus pushes Spam to record levels according to SingleHop, Inc.

Chicago, IL - Chicago-based managed dedicated server provider, SingleHop, Inc., has seen spam distribute as much as 2,000 emails in five minutes since the Storm virus broke on U.S. shores late last week. Spam increased 6% to 96% because of the virus. According to an eweek article, the virus first appeared in Europe and is called “Storm” because of major storm references in the subject line – like “230 dead as storm Europe.”

“Our Spamalizer/Barracuda appliance filtered nearly 40,000 emails in one day when we discovered the virus,” says Andy Pace, VP of Operations for SingleHop. “We believe that over one million PC’s are currently infected; Symantec has raised its risk level to a category three out of five, making this one of the nastiest Trojan horse viruses to come around in awhile. The author of this is ultimately trying to get a worldwide distribution of a penny stock solicitation message without paying for it.”    

According to various sources there have been periods in the past week that this one virus has accounted for a whopping 17% of worldwide email traffic. Malware writers develop multiple variants of each attack, anticipating the security response and distributing the malware in successive waves with subtle changes that can circumvent newly developed filters. “It’s a game of cat and mouse,” says Pace. “It seems that virus writers consistently outsmart antivirus tools such as Microsoft Defender, which drives at the crux of the issue: the Microsoft operating system itself.  Vista may solve some of these issues by deploying native virus scanning,” he adds.

What’s the best action to take?  “Institute a no executable attachment policy on all servers and hope that a new delivery method is deployed soon,” warns Pace.

About SingleHop, Inc.
SingleHop is the industry’s first fully transparent managed dedicated server ISP. Located in Chicago, IL, SingleHop was formed to deliver low cost managed IT services for the small to medium enterprises from a central Midwest hub location. The company has capacity for over 2,000 servers in one datacenter, with a network powered entirely by Cisco. www.singlehop.com