The Power of the Storm Worm
Brian Krebs writes in his column today that the most powerful collective computing array is now the millions of infected Windows hosts running the Storm Worm. The Storm Cluster is estimated to be more powerful than the top ten world’s best supercomputers. Combined.
From the WaPo here:
The network of compromised Microsoft Windows computers under the thumb of the criminals who control the Storm Worm has grown so huge that it now has more raw distributed computing power than all of the world’s top supercomputers, security experts say.
Estimates on the number of machines infected by Storm range from one million to 10 million, depending upon which security sources you believe.
The Storm botnet could easily outperform IBM’s BlueGene/L, currently the top-ranked supercomputer on the planet.
The Storm cluster has the equivalent of one to 10 million 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 processors with one to 10 million petabytes worth of RAM. Whether we’re talking about disk space or the size of a computer’s temporary memory space, a petabyte is a truly staggering number. To put the size of a petabyte into perspective, Google, as of Aug. 2007, uses between 20 and 200 petabytes of disk space, according to Wikipedia.com.
That much power could crack the most difficult crypto pretty well. It could decode the human genome. That much power could read, catalog and store all of the world’s art and literature. It could create a denial of service attack that would crush any site on the internet- and millions of them at once. But mostly it sends out spam that says “A worshipper has sended you an e-card.” So much for the imagination of supervillains.
