Just a few months ago it was being reported that six botnets controlled the distribution of a staggering 85 percent of all spam.

Storm was a premium player as far as spam was concerned, responsible for those "USA declares war on Iran" emails designed to hook people into opening malware-linked emails and ultimately assimilate them into the Storm botnet collective.

Indeed, Storm Botnet picked up the name from one of the early 2007 email subject lines which warned of lethal storms in Europe.

Of course, when you reach the top of any tree you become a target for those who want to take your place. And so it was that the Rustock Botnet gangs enlisted the help of George Bush and Paris Hilton to push its global share of the spam market up to 21 percent during the summer.

Even that, though, was not enough to elevate it above Srizbi.

And now comes the news that everyone in the IT security game was waiting for: the death of Storm. The guys from the Marshal TRACE Team has reported that spam originating from the Storm botnet ceased altogether during September 2008.

Phil Hay, Lead Threat Analyst for TRACE, argues that Storm was one of the first botnets to use the malicious spam tactic, along with electronic greetings cards and other things on such a massively successful scale. "It became the most successful botnet of its type and established the basic template for developing a spam empire that other botnets have since copied" Hays says.

So how powerful was Storm, and what exactly has happened to it now? More on page 2...

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"Whoever was behind Storm really set the benchmark at the time for the kind of scale that was achievable with a spambot. They also led the way in using self-perpetuating malicious spam to grow the botnet. They utilised every social engineering trick in the book and invented quite a few of their own" Hays concludes.

And now, after infecting anything around 1 million computers, and being compared to the kind of processing power usually reserved for supercomputers, Storm is no more.

Part of the glory goes, oddly enough, to Microsoft. Back in September 2007 it added Storm to the cross hairs of the Malicious Software Removal Tool, and within a month had cleaned no less than 274,372 computers.

With hundreds of thousands more following in the coming months, by the end of January its share of the spam market had dropped from 20 percent by volume to just 2 percent.

Since then it has rarely exceeded 1 percent.

So what, exactly has happened to the Storm Botnet? Well, Hay reckons there is a "distinct possibility is that the creators of Storm have abandoned it in favour of a newer botnet that they have created. If they have, it is possibly one of the top spam botnets that we continue to track."

Indeed, the chances of the gang behind Storm simply shrugging their shoulders and abandoning such a juicy source of illicit income are lower than John McCain giving Barack Obama a big hug and a kiss in the final Presidential debate.