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Researchers Ponder Conficker's April Fool's Activation Date
The Narrative Fallacy writes "John Markoff has a story at the NY Times speculating about what will happen on April 1 when the Conficker worm is scheduled to activate. Already on an estimated 12 million machines, conjectures about Conficker's purpose ranges from the benign — an April Fool's Day prank — to far darker notions. Some say the program will be used in the 'rent-a-computer-crook' business, something that has been tried previously by the computer underground. '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,' writes Markoff. According to a paper by researchers at SRI International, in the Conficker C version of the program, infected computers can act both as clients and servers and share files in both directions. With these capabilities, 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. On a darker note, Stefan Savage, a computer scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has suggested the possibility 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,' writes Markoff. 'That would be a dragnet — and a genuine horror story.'"
If you know when the code is going to start running, why don't you know what it will do after that? It's not like programs (and that's all a virus/worm is) are written in special, unreadable code. It's all machine language.
What is the big mystery?
Oh come on people, John Markoff did never ever shine with much clue about computers, much on the contrary. Why are we reading sorries from this dude on computers?
As for the article on conficker: it's speculation. That's not news. It's a guessing game.
I personally which, that the conficker virus should do as much damage as possible and render the whole interwebs useless for a few days, so that our security geniuses get a hint on how sane it is to set up the majority of computer systems with the same OS, especially such a vulnerable one. But that probably won't happen.
A reliable network source? Surely that couldn't be faked on an isolated network!
There's no other way to explain the enormous profits. People ask me, *Why do people write these viruses?* It's because the market demands it.
What?
Maybe... if you know the 4096-bit key.
First, the "April 1" date isn't when some attack starts. The worm's authors can do that at any time, since this thing does downloads over its private P2P network. It's just when the scheme for connecting to control hosts is upgraded.
Second, the complexity of the thing, the breadth of technologies employed, and the rate of updates indicates that it's the product of an organization, not an individual. Someone behind this has money.
Third, there's a $250,000 reward, and no claimants, so the people behind this have the sense to shut up. They're not going to be found boasting on some IRC channel.
Fourth, as usual, most of the vulnerabilities are related to Windows' propensity for "autorunning" anything that looks executable.
This logic always irks me. Do you really believe the speculative pundits they interview for these articles are more likely to come up with a new idea than the talented and probably extremely intelligent programmers who wrote up the Conficker worm in the first place?
Yes, perhaps some less-than-average person has now read this article and has seen the new idea for the first time, but that's no one to worry about. Usually if you are smart enough to implement some genius idea, you think of it first.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
But the botnet folks have been all over cloud computing for so long I think the major market proponents trying to sell that stuff are actually taking their cues from the botnets, not the other way around.
If Conficker goes live it will be the most powerful supercomputer on the planet. It will have more than 100 times the RAM, processors and storage of RoadRunner, the official record holder. The official record doesn't include prior worms like Storm. It will have more bandwidth than Google. It could store the Internet Archive a thousand times over, redundantly. It will have access to the personal documents of at least 10 million people. The operator clearly has the understanding necessary to harness all of that power or Conficker would not exist. Statistically at least a few of those PCs must have access to databases that know the medical history, credit application and other intimate details of the rest of us. You would have to be living off the grid since birth to escape the awareness of this thing.
And the guy running it won't be paying anything at all for it. They could if they wanted to make all those millions of computers do protein folding and help find cures for cancer overnight. The aggregate extra CPU load would probably bring several regional power grids down. They probably won't do that. Whatever it is they do it's probably not going to be good.
You know, I wish the people responsible for large enterprises would look at this and say - "Hey! There's an opportunity here. We could leverage our existing assets to do some interesting distributed architecture stuff between Greg the typist's keystrokes. After hours we could probably have some incredible data mining going on! Lunchtime our desktops could be doing something more interesting than driving that aquarium screensaver! You know, there's a lot of storage on these desktops that's could be put to good use..." I would really like that. I've been crying in my coffee for twenty years that I can't find somebody brilliant enough to do let me do that.
Maybe that's this guy's problem too. He got tired of waiting for permission from people with no understanding and took the initiative because he could.
Help stamp out iliturcy.