This week's storm of Windows worms is compounded by the fact that rival botnet gangs have written worms that attack each other, targetting one-another's compromised zombies and converting them to part of their own botnets.
"We seem to have a botwar on our hands," Hypponen said Wednesday. "There appear to be three different virus-writing gangs turning out new worms at an alarming rate, as if they were competing to build the biggest network of infected machines."
The first worm, dubbed Zotob, appeared on Sunday and appeared to have faded Monday. However, several Zotob offshoots and another new worm, Bozori, were subsequently unleashed. New versions of pre-existing threats Rbot, Sdbot, CodBot and IRCBot also began wriggling their way into computers. Systems at CNN, ABC and The New York Times were hit.
