2007 has undoubtedly been the most successful year for spammers since email launched viruses and worms appeared on the internet. The ever evolving "Storm" worm has continued to baffle attempts at squelching this insidious problem.

Since its launch in late 2006 or early 2007 (opinions vary among antivirus technicians) the primary goal of this worm seems to be directed at creating a massive worldwide bot-net. With estimates varying from between one million and fifty million infected computers around the globe, Storm (also known as Peacomm and W32/Nuwar) has been used as a means to flood the world with virtually untraceable email spam. The bot-net has been successful in launching Denial of Service attacks on various corporation websites and is believed to be working toward infiltrating government and military networks for the ultimate terrorist attack.

The Storm worm is extremely hard to identify and even harder to get rid of when it is. It has been demonstrated that, like a true virus, this program is not only evolving but becoming more able to detect investigations into its workings and launch denial of service attacks against the IP addresses of those who are trying to investigate it.

It has not yet been used so much to collect personal data as to give its operators control of the infected computers so that the bandwidth usage to launch massive email sendings is incurred by those who's computers are linked to the bot-net. That these machines are also instrumental in launching the previously stated denial of service attacks means that the originators are masked behind countless intermediary exchanges.

A great danger lies with the originators ability to test new scam attempts while remaining undetectable. The best anyone has been able to identify the creators of this worm is Finland's anti-virus maker F-Secure. They are reasonably certain that it originates from a group called the Zhelatin Gang based somewhere in Russia.

Storm has used many different methods of tricking people into clicking the link that will download the worm and enslave your computer. Several of the most popularly known attacks this year were the "You on YouTube" emails, convincing you that you were posted in a video and the "Hallmark" greeting card scam. Some of the lesser know but more insideous methods were in html coded emails and image bombs where the infecting code was embedded in a non-text only email.

Some variants of the Storm worm have been identified and the new Microsoft updates for Windows includes detection rules that will disable it on an infected machine. The growth of the Storm worm is beginning to subside, or at least it seems to be. The big problem with Storm is that by its mutating nature, it may be taking a new course that has yet to be identified as an emerging variation of the program. Its damage to the world at large is that it is increasingly harder to trust even supposedly secure sites and thus the world becomes a bit less friendly every day.