What is meant by storm worm?

Storm worm? You may not recognize this worm at the first instance since you might be knowing it by one of the following other names:

1. Small. Dam
2. Trojan- downloader. Win 32. Small. Dam
3. F secure as dubbed by the finnish company.
4. W32/ Numwar@MM
5. Downloader BAI (McAfee’s specific variant)
6. Trojan. DL. Tibs. Gen! Pact13
7. Trojan. Peacomm (Symantec)
8. Win32/ Nuwar (ESET)
9. W32/ Zhelatin (kaspersky, F secure)
10. Trojan. Peed (Bit Defender)
11. Trojan. Tibs (Bit Defender)
12. Win32/ Nuwar. N@MM! CME- 711 (windows live one care)
13. TROJ_SMALL. EDW (trend micro)
14. Trojan. Downloader – 647
15. Loland Mal/ Dorf (sophos)
16. CME- 711 (mitre)

Evolution of Storm Worm

- It was recognized as a back door Trojan horse that had most of its impact on the computer systems that use the Microsoft operating systems or applications or extensions.

- This worm was first observed on the date of 17th January in the year of 2007.

- The storm worm first took its affect in the countries of the United States and Europe infecting millions of computer systems starting on the date of 19th January 2007.

- It was usually sent to the users as an e-mail message having the subject as a headline about the recent weather disaster like “230 dead as storm batters Europe”.

- At the starting of this cyber epidemic, there were around 6 waves of attack subsequently.

- At the end of the January 2007, the storm worm was said to account for 8 percent of all the world wide malware infections.

- According to the PC world, the history or origin of the storm worm can be traced back to a Russian business network.

- Mostly the European wind storm “kyrill” was used as the subject of the infected e- mails.

- This email usually had an attachment accompanying it which when opened, automatically installed this malware on to the system of the users.

Steps involved in installing the Malware

The malware was installed via the following steps:

1. Installation of the wincom32 service
2. Injection of payload
3. Passing of the packets to destinations as mentioned in the malware code.
4. Download and run the W32. Mixor. Q@mm worm and Trojan. Abwiz. F Trojan.

These downloaded Trojans then attached themselves to spam like flashcard.exe, postcard.exe and so on. Other changes regarding the original attack wave were made as the mutation of the attack carried on. Below mentioned are some other prominent spam attachments:
1. Ecard.exe
2. Fullstory.exe
3. Read more. Exe
4. Greeting postcard.exe
5. Read more.exe
6. Full news.exe
7. Arcade world.exe
8. Fullvideo.exe
9. Video.exe
10. Full clip.exe
11. More here.exe
12. Click here.exe
13. Nfl stat tracker.exe
14. Arcade world game.exe

Later the storm worm came to be spread by subjects regarding love such as “touched by love”, “love birds” and so on. These e- mails had the links referring to the malicious web sites containing virus like:

1. With love.exe
2. With_love.exe
3. From me to you.exe
4. Fck2008.exe
5. Fck2009.exe
6. Love.exe
7. Iheart you.exe

The storm worm has an exceptional ability to stay resilient. The affected machine or system used to become a part of botnet networks which was controlled through a central server. A botnet is seeded by the storm worm that acts as a P2P network without any control. The connected systems then act as a host and share the list of other hosts. One peculiarity was observed in the working of these machines which is that none of them shared the whole list of botnets.

What are different aspects of distributed testing?

We have heard a lot about different kinds of testing such as regression testing, scalability testing, web testing, unit testing, visual testing, and performance testing and so on. But do you know what is distributed testing? Ever heard about it? No? Then this piece of writing is certainly for you!

This type of testing usually receives very less coverage and that’s why most of the people are not familiar with it. Here I have attempted to explain what is meant by distributed testing and how it compares with its non distributive counterpart.

Non distributed testing can be defined as the tests that run or execute only on a single computer and usually do not involve any kind of interaction with the other computer systems. I used the word “usually” here because there exist some tests that are executed from a host machine to test the target device which holds an embedded or a real time operating system. Non distributed test cases can be configured very easily.

Non distributed testing is further divided into two sub categories namely local testing and remote testing. They have been discussed in details below:

- Local Testing
This kind of testing involves running the test cases on a local computer system. The tests used are called local tests. For performing local test you don’t have to be connected to a network connection.

- Remote Testing
This kind of testing requires a network connection so that you can run a test on a remote computer system to which you don’t have local access. This is very comfortable since you can work right from your desk and you also get the results right on your desk. Remote tests can be performed on several computer systems at a time. The best about thing about remote testing is that no matter how many software systems are under the distributed testing, there is no interference between the processors of different CPUs.

Now that you have got the idea of how non distributed testing is like, it will be easy for you to understand distributed testing is like.
- A distributed test case consists of many parts that interact with each other.
- Each part of the test case is executed on different computer system.
- The interaction of the different parts of the distributed testing sets it apart from non distributed testing.
- If you notice the testing is all about testing the interaction between different computer systems.
- All of the test cases being processed on different processors have a common aim irrespective of the system on which they are performed.
- Distributed testing is not to be confused with simultaneous testing since in simultaneous testing there is no interaction between the different tests.
- Platform proves to be one of the great challenges to the distributed testing.
- The testing environment should be capable of working on all the platforms involved effectively.
- After setting up of your testing environment, you need to make a test plan or say that you need to describe how you want to carry out distributed testing.
- This can be done via a test scenario.
- A test scenario lists all the test cases and also describes how they are to carried out on the computer systems.
- The description of the test cases is provided in the form of a formal directive.
- Test scenario is an effective way to describe test cases.
- For distributed testing we use distributed directives and for non distributed testing we use remote directives.