Microsoft didn't crush Storm, counter researchers

By the company's count, the MSRT cleaned more than 526,000 Storm-infected PCs in the final four months of last year. After some back and forth between the Storm bot herders and Microsoft, the former gave up, said Jimmy Kuo, a senior security architect at the company.

Not so fast, said Trend Micro.

More important, though, is the big picture, said Ferguson and Yaneza. Storm is certainly diminished, they agreed, but not simply because of Microsoft and its MSRT.

"Storm is still out there," he said. And active. "We've seen campaigns to renew their [botnet] body count within the last 48 hours," Ferguson said.