Conficker: Worm turns 1 year and is still armed and dangerous
One year after the Conficker botnet was front-page news around the world it is still controlling approximately 6 million PCs around the world. IT Security Experts describe it like a loaded gun that can go off anytime if it is not stopped.
The Conficker worm has distributed itself throughout and across networks on portable storage devices and continues to do so on unprotected PCs.
Now the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is preparing a report looking at the worldwide effort to keep it in check.
“We said, ‘This was a very good example of the private sector, globally, working together to try to solve a cybersecurity attack, so let’s fund the creation of a lessons-learned report to just document what worked, what didn’t work,’” said Douglas Maughan, a program manager with the Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate.
The report could provide a template for future cyber-responses, security experts say.
Conficker began spreading in November 2008, infecting computers via a variety of means, including an attack exploiting a known flaw in Microsoft Windows.
Though it is still thought to control between 4 million and 7 million computers, Conficker was only briefly put to use, in April 2009. It’s as if the massive amount of scrutiny it generated eventually frightened away its creators — a good thing, since it controls enough computers to create a withering distributed denial-of-service attack.
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