While just ten years ago this paper would have been considered Internet science fiction, the “Storm” worm has become a well-known phenomenon among IT security professionals tasked with keeping the electronic communications we depend upon safe, secure and reliable.

Storm has taken malware propagation to a new level, by increasing the viability of malicious servers, decreasing the ability to “shut down” those enabling servers, and continuously “morphing” in order to evade typical signature based defenses.

In Terminator language, Storm is the “shape shifter” of the Internet and its sustainability and rapid propagation create new levels of threat to any organization connected to the Internet.