Proving imitation in the sincerest form of flattery, even in the world of malware creation, VXers have adapted a four-year old worm to exploit the vulnerability used by the Conficker superworm.

The Neeris worm, which dates from as far back as May 2005, making it a bit of geriatric, has been adapted to spread using the infamous MS08-067 vulnerability harnessed by Conficker. Earlier variants of the Neeris worm exploited a much older flaw (MS06-040) in the same Windows component hit by the Conficker exploit, so the update to the older malware probably involved more of a tweak than a complete rewrite.

"This new variant of Neeris spiked on late March 31 and during 1 April," security researchers at Microsoft note. "However it was not downloaded by any Conficker variant and there’s no evidence that it’s related to Conficker's April 1 domain algorithm activation."

In other Conficker-related developments, security researchers at SRI International have released an open source Conficker scanner module, tuned to detect machines infected with the latest (Conficker-c) variant of the superworm, the Internet Storm Centre reports. ®

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