Everybody's favorite piece of malware, Storm Worm, is back again. Since Storm made its debut in 2006, its developers have used a variety of tactics to lure recipients to download sites where they can infect their machines, beginning with fake news articles about storms in Europe (hence the name) and moving on through fake greetings cards, and pitches for imaginary games or MP3 download sites. Along the way, there have been several 'topical' or 'seasonal' variants that refer to particular events or holidays.

For Christmas this year, Storm has been offering a variety of Christmas-themed messages pointing to download sites with names like 'merrychristmasdude.com' and 'uhavepostcard.com'. Now that Christmas is past, it has switched to New Year greetings, pointing to 'newyearcards2008.com', 'happycards2008.com' and so on.

The prevailing opinion seems to be that the threat posed by Storm is diminishing, but its operators seem determined to show that there's life in the old worm yet. It's worth remembering that each time you get a fake New Year greeting from Storm, that probably represents a compromised machine running Storm.