Our measurements show that our strategy can be used as a way to disable the communication within the Storm botnet to a large extent. As a side effect, we are able to estimate the size of the Storm botnet, in general a hard task [25]. Our measurements are much more precise than previous measurements [12, 17]. This is because measurements previously were based on passive techniques, ., by observing visible network events like the number of spam mails supposedly sent via the bots. We are the first to introduce an active measurement technique to actually enumerate the number of infected machines: We crawl the P2P network, keep track of all.
