Web Security News

Researchers track Conficker on 4.6 million PCs

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

The Conficker worm that has mutated and spread to millions of PCs worldwide since last year is the largest botnet on the planet, but security experts have had difficulty pinning down the exact number of infected machines.

A recent report from IBM put the number of infections as high as 4 percent of PCs, which would mean tens of millions of infections worldwide. But yesterday the Conficker Working Group released data of its own tracking of the worm, putting the number at about 4.6 million PCs.

"The bottom line is that no one can give an exact number on any infection ever. If anyone ever states exact numbers, they either are controlling it, or are not being completely honest to themselves or others on the means of data collection," the working group said.

On top of simple traffic analysis, the researchers used unique mechanisms for tracking infection statistics for the different variants. "Each of these methods of course come with their own positives and negatives when discussing accuracy of the data," the working group said.

Conficker.A and Conficker.B variants account for approximately 3.4 million unique IP addresses and the Conficker.C variant unleashed April 1 has infected 1.2 million addresses, the researchers said.