Conficker Worm – The Worst Internet Worm Outbreak in Years!
“The best way to defeat potential botnets like Conficker/Downadup is by the security and domain name system communities working together,” said Greg Rattray, ICANN chief Internet security adviser, in a statement released Thursday. “ICANN represents a community that’s all about coordinating those kinds of efforts to keep the Internet globally secure and stable.”
Conficker, also known as the Downadup worm, takes advantage of a critical bug in Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which was patched last October. Since late December the worm has emerged as one of the worst computer threats in years, infecting more than 10 million computer systems worldwide, including PCs within the British and French militaries.
If Conficker’s author lives in a part of the world that’s known to be soft on cybercrime — Russia, the Ukraine or Romania, for example — it may be hard to get a conviction, said the editor of the Hostexploit.com cybercrime research site, who goes by the pseudonym Jart Armin.
What is the Conficker Work?
Microsoft released an update in October to resolve a critical security hole in the Windows “Server” service. Since people aren’t as diligent about patching as they should be, hackers created a new worm that spread like wildfire, leaving systems completely under their control. Security researchers have determined that the virus is expected to go “live” on April 1st, 2009, causing your computer to do bad things?but since the worm uses a P2P protocol it’s nearly impossible to identify the source.
