Night of the living botnet

After blowing itself out 18 months ago, the notorious Storm botnet is back, researchers from CA said Tuesday.

Storm - once responsible for churning out 20 percent of the world's spam - started to peter out in September 2007, when Microsoft targeted it through the Malicious Software Removal Tool. Some 274,372 demonized PCs were exorcised during the first month alone. A year later, researchers from Marshal declared the menace dead.

Now, security watchers at CA say they've spotted a new botnet that bears the hallmarks of Storm and is sending out a "massive volume of spam emails to targeted recipients." An analysis of the command and control servers shows it used Base64 encoded data to send infected machines instructions and templates for junk-mail relating to adult dating services, penis pills and other online pharmacy scams.