During the week of Jan. 15, an innocuous-looking e-mail appeared in thousands of inboxes around the world. Its subject line read, ‘230 dead as storm batters Europe.’ The e-mail came with a file attached, bearing a plausible-sounding name like Full Story.exe or Read More.exe. Plenty of people clicked on it. After all, storms really were battering Europe at the time; that week high winds and rain had killed 14 in the U.K. alone. But all great cons have a grain of truth in them somewhere. The file that arrived with the e-mail was, of course, a computer virus, immediately christened the Storm Worm by the Finnish computer security firm F-Secure, which was among the first to spot it. Since then, the Storm Worm has proved remarkably hard to kill. Nine months later, it’s still out there, infecting something like a million computers worldwide. It’s not the most damaging virus in history, but it may be the most sophisticated. Whoever created it is to viruses what Michelangelo was to ceilings. The Storm Worm is a marvel of social engineering. Its subject line changes constantly. Whoever produced it–and its many later variants–has a lively feel for the seductive come-on and […]