The Cellar - This is very very bad

From here.

So not only has someone created a botnet with the processing power of a supercomputer, but it may have a built-in defense mechanism. Why does this sound like a doomsday sci-fi movie?

Quote:

Researchers Fear Reprisals From Storm

http://img.lightreading.com/images/spacer.gif Massive botnet can launch denial-of-service attacks on those who threaten it http://img.lightreading.com/images/spacer.gif http://img.lightreading.com/images/spacer.gif OCTOBER 29, 2007 | 4:10 PM
By Tim Wilson
Site Editor, Dark Reading
A warning to those who might try to stop the Storm worm: Be prepared for a counterattack.
Researchers say they have heard of several instances in which Storm -- the infamous botnet created by a widespread worm/Trojan distributed across the Internet -- has successfully launched reprisals against those who try to break it.
"This is the first time that I can remember ever seeing researchers who were actually afraid of an investigating an exploit," said Josh Corman, principal security strategist at IBM's Internet Security Systems unit, in an interview last week at Interop New York.
"The bad news about Storm is that it fights back," said Shane Coursen, senior technical consultant at Kaspersky Lab, during a session at the conference. "There have been cases in which a researcher was discovered, and within five seconds, he had a DDOS attack from 10,000 bots."
It's not clear whether Storm's reprisals are automated or manual, says Joe Stewart, a researcher at SecureWorks who has been studying Storm since it first emerged at the beginning of this year. "They could be triggered by behavior that's typical of a researcher, or they could be the result of someone studying logs and launching an attack in response," he says.

Quote:

Corman said that Storm's potential as a launching pad for DDOS attacks is enormous. "It hasn't been used that way yet, but the potential is there," he said. "If they wanted to take out a different financial institution every week, they could do it." Corman believes that estimates showing Storm at 50 million nodes are wildly inaccurate, but he believes that the botnet may be as big as 9 million nodes. (See Storm Worm Botnet Attacks Anti-Spam Firms.)