Downadup Worm — When Will the Next Shoe Drop?

alphadogg writes "The Downadup worm — also called Conflicker — has now infected an estimated 10 million PCs worldwide, and security experts say they expect to see a dangerous second-stage payload dropped soon. 'It has the potential to infect about 30% of Windows systems online, a potential 300 to 350 million PCs,' says Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence in the counter threat unit at SecureWorks. The worm, first identified in November and suspected to have originated in the Ukraine, is quickly ramping up, and while Downadup today is not malicious in the sense of destroying files — its main trick is to block users from accessing antivirus sites to obtain updates to protect against it — the worm is capable of downloading second-stage code for darker purposes."

Comments

Re:what will it download?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the big areas hit by downadup is in the corporate world where PCs are "managed". A lot of those have not been patched and are infected already or probably will be soon. Once it gets a foothold behind a firewall, it uses multiple other strategies to spread - weak passwords, etc.

In a lot of business environments, deleting files could be crippling because those often times have people who don't back up their files, there isn't really a company policy, etc. It's bad enough when somebody loses a hard drive. Try having everyone "lose their hard drive".

Another issue is this is the first time I have seen the infection attributed to a Russian-area site. Everywhere else it has been attributed to some one or some group in China.

Regardless, one of the uses of a botnet is for cyber warfare. In this case the cat is out of the bag and people are watching it closely to see what it is going to do. But if the people who built this are sophisticated enough, or maybe this one spreads laterally and more stealthily than people have yet noticed, it could have a real purpose much more sinister than just deleting files or snagging myspace passwords. Downadup could also just be a decoy.

It's been said that the first clues that war is coming will be people's computers not working properly as infrastructure and services are knocked out. Anyone starting a war will want a crushing first blow and taking out files, doing DDoS, etc, would be typical.

Not trying to scaremonger but obviously this thing is illicit and almost guaranteed malicious. It would be naive to disregard a government's hand in it.