Skype Storm Worm is not a Worm. It’s a Virus!

Posted in Hacking, Law, Spam by Elliott Back on September 10th, 2007.

I’m going to lay down the law here on the Storm Worm’s latest incarnation, w32/Ramex.A or W32/Skipi.A or W32.Pykspa.D. Although the official Skype blog refers to it as either “the worm” or “a virus”, their copy makes it clear that the Skype Storm Worm cannot spread without manual user action:

Skype has learned that a computer virus called “w32/Ramex.A” is affecting users of Skype for Windows. Users whose computers are infected with this virus will send a chat message to other Skype users asking them to click on a web link that can infect the computer of the person who receives the message.

Dwight Silverman gives a good overview about what exactly it does to convince a user to open the evil .scr file and infect themselves. After all, who wouldn’t click “NFL Season Is Here!”? That said, a computer worm is actually a lot more serious:

A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program. It uses a network to send copies of itself to other nodes (computer terminals on the network) and it may do so without any user intervention.

If this were a worm, all of Skype’s 10,000,000 users would have been infected in minutes, doubling or tripling the size of the “Storm Worm” botnet. So, you idiot bloggers, before you write something that scary, make sure you use the right terminology. I saw the headlines this morning at work and had a heart attack, and then read the story and cooled off. But, it’s probably not good for my blood pressure o_O.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 6:31 pm and is tagged with computer worm, dwight silverman, nfl season, skipi, ramex, scr file, storm worm, computer virus, computer terminals, skype, heart attack, windows users, computer program, web link, incarnation, bloggers, blood pressure, headlines, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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What is Storm? 1 year ago 1 point
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Worm? Virus? Today the lines are so blurred that it's best to just call everything malware. Most people, including the news, use the term virus as a synonym for malware.

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