Conficker: Still spamming after all these years

  • 3 July 2014
  • 5 replies
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Userlevel 7
Badge +54
I thought the real danger from Conficker had past quite a long time ago but it is still out there lurking in businesses waiting to be giving a new lease of life.
 
Summary: How pathetic is the security in many enterprises? Almost six years since the patch to stop it was issued, Conficker is still one of the most common threats.
 
By Larry Seltzer
 
"How many of these are still out there? The Conficker Working Group still tracks Conficker traffic. On Tuesday, July 1 they detected 1,148,345 unique IPs, which isn't the same as the number of systems. It could be much larger or smaller, but in any case it's still a big number, certainly in the hundreds of thousands.
If I'm not mistaken, Conficker was the last of the great Windows worms, which underscores the other lesson to learn from this: Enterprise endpoints running modern operating systems (generally Windows 7) don't have much of a malware/vulnerability problem. For many reasons, such as more secure coding practices, automatic updating and better Internet Explorer versions, users really have to try in order to get themselves infected. As XP dies away, most of the malware problem will die with it.
But will it actually die? I would assume that so many users who are still running ancient, vulnerable and infected computers at this date will not stop using them until the system is as dead as the Titanic.
Remember, these systems are in businesses, many with actual IT departments. They are responsible for the problem persisting."
 
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Userlevel 7
Badge +56
Wow, can't believe that one is still around.
Userlevel 7
Badge +56
Yea so many still never installed the Patch and the Eye Chart is still up and running to check! http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html
 
Daniel 😠
Userlevel 7
Badge +56
I guess we'll be having the same conversation about Heartbleed in 6 years 🙂
Userlevel 7
The following article is a update:
************************************

Remember Conficker? It's still around.

By Jeremy Kirk
 
In late 2008, a worm called Conficker began infecting millions of computers, startling the computer security community into action.
Conficker's quick spread was so alarming that an organization was formed called the Conficker Working Group that was tasked with stopping the botnet and finding its creators.
Many countries also formed their own groups that worked with Internet service providers to remove infections from users' computers. But seven years later, there are still about 1 million computers around the world infected with the malware despite the years-long cleanup effort.
Researchers in the Netherlands have analyzed those efforts and tried to figure out what went right and wrong in order to guide future botnet-fighting efforts. Their research paper will be presented next week at the 24th USENIX Security Symposium in Washington, D.C.
 
full article
Userlevel 6
That's because people on caps don't apply patches lol
 
😮

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