MESSAGE
| DATE | 2009-03-22 |
| FROM | Michael L Richardson
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Microsofts Doomsday Worm
|
Not to worry Windows will still be the biggest virus out there.
Read the GUARANTEE: www.paymymortgageearly.com
Ruben Safir wrote:
> March 19, 2009, 6:25 pm The Conficker Worm: April Fool’s Joke or
> Unthinkable Disaster? By John Markoff
>
> Update | 3:57 p.m. Added links to malware removal tools.
>
> The Conficker worm is scheduled to activate on April 1, and the unanswered
> question is: Will it prove to be the world’s biggest April Fool’s
> joke or is it the information age equivalent of Herman Kahn’s legendary
> 1962 treatise about nuclear war, “Thinking About the Unthinkable�
>
> Conficker is a program that is spread by exploiting several weaknesses in
> Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Various versions of the software
> have spread widely around the globe since October, mostly outside the
> United States because there are more computers overseas running unpatched,
> pirated Windows. (The program does not infect Macintosh or Linux-based
> computers.)
>
> An estimated 12 million or more machines have been infected. However, many
> have also been disinfected, so a precise census is difficult to obtain.
>
> It is possible to detect and remove Conficker using commercial antivirus
> tools offered by many companies. However, the most recent version of
> the program has a significantly improved capacity to remove commercial
> antivirus software and to turn off Microsoft’s security update service.
> It can also block communications with Web services provided by security
> companies to update their products. It even systematically opens holes in
> firewalls in an effort to improve its communication with other infected
> computers.
>
> Given the sophisticated nature of the worm, the question remains: What
> is the purpose of Conficker, which could possibly become the world’s
> most powerful parallel computer on April 1? That is when the worm will
> generate 50,000 domain names and systematically try to communicate with
> each one. The authors then only need to register one of the domain names
> in order to take control of the millions of zombie computers that have
> been created.
>
> Speculation about Conficker’s purpose ranges from the benign — an
> April Fool’s Day prank — to far darker notions. One likely possibility
> is that the program will be used in the “rent-a-computer-crookâ€
> business, something that has been tried previously by the computer
> underground. Just like Amazon.com offers computing time on its network
> for rent, the Conficker team might rent access to its “network†for
> nefarious purposes like spamming.
>
> The most intriguing clue about the purpose of Conficker lies in the
> intricate design of the peer-to-peer logic of the latest version of the
> program, which security researchers are still trying to completely decode.
>
> According to a research addendum to be added Thursday to an earlier paper
> by researchers at SRI International, in the Conficker C version of the
> program, the infected computers can act both as clients and servers and
> share files in both directions. The peer-to-peer design is also highly
> distributed, making it more difficult for security teams to defeat the
> system by disabling so-called super-nodes.
>
> Conficker’s authors could be planning to create a scheme like Freenet,
> the peer-to-peer system that was intended to make Internet censorship
> of documents impossible.
>
> Or perhaps the Conficker botnet’s masters have something more
> Machiavellian in mind. One researcher, Stefan Savage, a computer scientist
> at the University of California at San Diego, has suggested the idea of
> a “Dark Google.†What if Conficker is intended to give the computer
> underworld the ability to search for data on all the infected computers
> around the globe and then sell the answers? Malware already does this
> on a focused basis using a variety of schemes that are referred to as
> “spear phishing,†in a reference to the widespread use of social
> engineering tricks on the Net.
>
> But to do something like that on a huge scale? That would be a dragnet
> — and a genuine horror story.
>
> -- http://www.mrbrklyn.com - Interesting Stuff http://www.nylxs.com -
> Leadership Development in Free Software
>
> So many immigrant groups have swept through our town that Brooklyn, like
> Atlantis, reaches mythological proportions in the mind of the world -
> RI Safir 1998
>
> http://fairuse.nylxs.com DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS -
> RI Safir 2002
>
> "Yeah - I write Free Software...so SUE ME"
>
> "The tremendous problem we face is that we are becoming sharecroppers
> to our own cultural heritage -- we need the ability to participate in
> our own society."
>
> "> I'm an engineer. I choose the best tool for the job, politics be
> damned.< You must be a stupid engineer then, because politcs and
> technology have been attached at the hip since the 1st dynasty in
> Ancient Egypt. I guess you missed that one."
>
> © Copyright for the Digital Millennium
>
>
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