Cyber Attacks: Conficker

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16 May 2010, 9:26am

A summary of the Conficker worm, which attacked Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003, not too long ago. Reading this kind of stuff scares the hell out of me.

As of this writing, 17 months after it appeared and about a year after the April 1 update, Conficker [...] consists of anywhere from hundreds of thousands of computers to 12 million. No one knows for sure anymore, because with peer-to-peer communications, the worm no longer needs to check in with an outside command center, which is how the good guys kept count. Joffe estimates that with the four distinct strains (yet another one appeared on April 8, 2009), 6.5 million computers are probably infected.

The investigators see no immediate chance or even any effective way to kill it.

I remember reading about this back in mid 2009, but had no idea it was still such an enormous problem. Normally, I'd scoff and say "just get a Mac", but I have no reason to believe the same thing couldn't happen to, say, the iPhone OS once it gets popular enough. Think about how many iPhone OS devices are running and connected to some network 24 hours a day. And then think about all of the people who jailbreak their iPhones, intentionally weakening their security systems.

Yikes.

(via df)