Viruses/Worms News

Security officials give collective yawn to Conficker

Monday, March 30, 2009

Two days before a reported scheduled attack by seemingly never-ending Conficker botnet, various officials from security firms are issuing statements stating the impact of the worm will be minimal.

According to officials, the code update that is supposed to happen on April 1 will not be the end of the cyberworld and point to decreasing infection rates in the past two months, eWeek.com reports.

The officials also place a portion of the blame on the idea of massive attack on media reports hyping Conficker, which is also known as Downadup, as one of the bigger cyberthreats of 2009.

Since January, the number of machines infected with Conficker reportedly spiked from 2.4 million to 8.9 million, with some officials speculating at the time the botnet would be utilized for some coordinated attack.

The growth of Conficker inspired some security firms to band together with software giant Microsoft to hunt the worm down and eradicate it. The company also responded with a $250,000 bounty for information that eventually led to the capture of cybercriminals involved with Conficker.

Conficker initially exploited an unpatched Microsoft vulnerability last fall and has since evolved into a variant that can be transferred from different machines using USB devices.