Will You Be My Botnet? Storm Returns For Valentine's

Valentine's Day has been Botnet Day for as long as there have been botnets, and 2009 is no exception. An evolved and wily version of the Storm botnet is producing as many as a thousand variations of itself a day.The mid-February jump in botnet malware is as predictable as those message-bearing sugar hearts on the candy racks, and it's the same this year.

This time it's a variation of the Storm botnet of unhappy memory, and a particularly ugly variation it is.

2009's Valentine Storm is known as Waledac, and it's generating thousands of variants of its malware as it spreads.

And it's generating them fast: as many as a thousand Waleac variants a day are being produced.

The malware hooks are about what you'd expect: "love" links, e-card Valentine's greeting grabbers, romance ruses.

The big lesson in this is that old botnets don't fade away: Storm had been written off as yesterday's news, remembered for the once enormous zombie army it created.

Re-purposed and in some ways reinvented, Storm is back with what may turn out to be a vengeance.

Whether or not Cupid has an arrow aimed at you, you can bet that Waledac and other Valentine's attacks are going to try to worm their way into you computer if not your heart.