The Storm Worm, which made headlines a few weeks ago, was one of the first worms that came out with a known capability for infecting Windows Vista. Given the ever increasing threat of worms of this nature and the more rapidly adaptable tools malicious people are using, it"s no wonder that many companies are turning to third party solutions to help them keep their own offices safe.
Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Joel Smith, the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of AppRiver. AppRiver is a spam filtering and virus filtering company that does pre-filtering on mail, taking the load off onsite hosted servers. We talked about the nature of mail-propagating worms these days, as well as what role third parties are playing in putting a stop to them. If you"ve ever wondered exactly why large companies are finding themselves needing extra help or about how the nature of Internet worms is changing, you"ll find the interview interesting. One particular tidbit that stood out for me was the future of "Storm":
"... we actually think that this deployment was a test run. It was so quick that we think they were just testing the grounds, and in the next week or two they may plan a much more sophisticated campaign."
Could it be on its way back? We also went a bit into what role his company plays in fighting spam and worms.