Storm Trojan infections not nearly as wide spread as thought?
Speculation continues that the Storm Trojan might not have infected as many machines as initially believed.
...Microsoft's Anti-Malware team discovered that the total number of Storm Trojan removals placed it third in the overall list of malware variants removed from the systems of end users. With more than 660,000 removals each, Renos and Zlob malware types led the Nuwar / Storm family of malware. Nuwar variants, and components of Nuwar were successfully removed from just under a quarter of a million systems.
A third party researcher notified Microsoft of a drop of almost 20% of the total DoS capability for the malware bot network in the days following the update to the MSRT, implying that it was directly related to the update. While correlation does not imply causation, it is an interesting data point that could point to an infection rate significantly lower than most have predicted. Microsoft's own assessment is that the quarter of a million machines cleaned up represented almost 100,000 machines in the active botnet. Combined with the 20% reduction, it suggests that the overall size of the botnet is only 500,000 machines, with another couple of hundred thousand that are not active, but are infected.
[Guessing at compromised host numbers]
