Conficker: Hold the funeral, it's not dead yet
50,000 new Windows systems hit every day
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Media coverage of the Conficker superworm has died down over recent weeks but variants of the worm are still infecting 50,000 new PCs a day.
The US, Brazil and India are the main cultivation grounds for the worm, according to reports from the Symantec threat intelligence team.
Symantec has knocked up a colour-coded map illustrating the spread of the worm, which can be found here.
Conficker (aka Downadup) infects a Windows system by either exploiting systems unprotected against the MS08-067 vulnerability patched by Microsoft back in April, or by taking advantage of weak password security to spread across network shares. Infected USB sticks and other items of removable media can also spread the infection.
The worm infected millions of systems in the run-up to 1 April, where it changed the way it phoned home to pre-programmed servers to poll for updates. Nothing happened, apart from excitable media coverage of the date itself, but on 9 April some infected systems began to download additional items of malicious code via P2P update functionality built into the latest variants of the worm. The updated components included copies of the Waledac Trojan, a botnet application used to send spam.
Despite this there have been no reports of use of Conficker-compromised machines in either sending spam or running denial of service attacks. The overall population of the Conficker worm is constantly eroded by clean-up efforts, so even though 50,000 new machines might be getting infected every day the overall population of infected machines is probably in long-term decline.
The latest on malicious activities associated with the Conficker worm can be found on the Conficker Working Group website here. ®
COMMENTS
Am I the only one...
...beginning to seriously doubt these figures?
"...but variants of the worm are still infecting 50,000 new PCs a day."
"The worm infected millions of systems in the run-up to 1 April..."
Show your working, or lose marks!
Botnets are becomming mainstream news, and as we all know, figures get fudged. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
It still lives...
On13th May, the local media in one of the Greater Manchester boroughs, reported that the pc machines in a NHS trust hospital, namely Tameside General Hospital were infected with the Conficker virus.
One would think that large responsible organisations and Government depts, would have system features and scanners in place to prevent such an attack taking place, especially when the awareness factor of the Conficker virus has been known since last year.
Perhaps there is something clearly wrong with the way that particular hospital is managed?
The reported article about the conficker infection:
http://www.tamesideadvertiser.co.uk/news/s/1115038_bug_brings_disruption_to_hospital
Such a lovely idea.
That people should start protecting themselves and others by affirmative action. The thing is if human beings worked this way there would be no need to worry about STD's, AIDS or any other nasties that abound because we'd all understand the need for protection.
The fact of the matter is most people are completely ignorant of the dangers out there. It's all very well you lot pontificating about using common sense and adblocker etc etc but 90% (OK I'm guessing) of ordinary folk haven't got a fucking clue what you're talking about. Yes, you as someone 'informed' about the perils of unfettered internet access know what to do, but Doris of Neasden who wants her groceries delivered at 4.45 before the kids get home from school, has fuck all idea of what you're on about. And why should she? She's been told that the interweb is fantastic and and and you can do all kinds of things and and and it's brilliant and that..
sorry - I need to have a little lie down now.
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