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Conficker Downloads Payload
nk497 writes "Conficker seems to finally be doing something, a week after hype around the worm peaked on April Fool's Day. It has now downloaded components from the Waledac botnet, which could contain rootkit capabilities. Trend Micro security expert Rik Ferguson said: 'These components have so far been missing, but could this finally be the "other boot dropping" that we have all been been waiting for?' Ferguson also suggested that people behind Conficker could be the very same who are running Waledac and created the Storm botnet. 'It tallies with some of the assumptions people have made about Conficker — that the first variant was actively trying to avoid the Ukraine because Waledac was Eastern European,' Ferguson added."
It's about damned time. Can we stop reading about this daily now?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
all the doom and gloom prophets can say they were right, and then tell us to believe that the earth still revolves around the sun.
Downloading its payload and going live a week after April 1? Now that's the way to do an April Fools joke.
This guy's the limit!
Bots and spammers typically wait for the holiday weekends; like playing your starters against their backups.
I think it would have been more logical for conficker to download it's payload on the 1st of April itself, so that people would take the threat less serious.
One of the major causes of the Potato famine in Ireland was the reliance on a single product (the potato) and an inability to shift to a more varied diet. Things like ILoveYou and Conflicker are preying on exactly the same homogeneous environment as they know that hitting one element yields massive results.
Now given that this homogeneity has been driven in part via a convicted monopolist then it really is interesting how little political attention this gets. Arguably these sorts of attacks are more of a modern challenge than "traditional" terrorism and against a background of economic woe we can all do without a bunch of companies getting taken offline for a few days or suffering from industrial espionage.
We don't learn from history, we don't apply history to new cases we just stand back in amazement after letting homogeneity develop at the impact that a relatively simple flaw can have across a large group of people.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
http://blog.trendmicro.com/downadconficker-watch-new-variant-in-the-mix/
Ssh! Don't wake it.
On a side note, that eye chart the Conflicker Group had up no longer works.
http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Why didn't someone infected with this, say last month, change their pc clock ahead to April 1 to see if it downloaded stuff or not? Then April 2, then April 3, etc.
Duh.
See, if you're going to go all political and off-topic, you should at least try and make some sort of attempt to link it to the story at hand...
for example...
If you look at the facts the conficker virus and waladac botnet are CLEARLY parts of a vast left wing conspiracy which is obviously fronted by obama because the democrats want to take as much of your processing power as they do your income
PLEASE, PLEASE mod parent funny
Laughter is the best medicine, except if you have a broken rib.
One of the major causes of the Potato famine in Ireland was the reliance on a single product (the potato) and an inability to shift to a more varied diet
No, the cause of the potato famine in Ireland was because the British deliberately starved the people. At the time, Britain had trading policies in place the prevented the Irish from actually developing their own economy. Do you think they wanted to eat nothing but potatoes? It was all they had.
Now given that this homogeneity
If you want to have more varied products, then you need to oppose free trade, and incidentally, open source. That way, you could encourage the capital formation necessary to create multiple, regionally designed operating systems.
This is my sig.
This isn't Vietnam. That isn't the preferred nomenclature. Just "Ukraine" like any other country, thanks!
That was the suggestion.
Deleted
This sure is entertaining from over here on Linux Island! *sips drink*
Isn't anyone else curious to see what happens next?! I can just imagine millions of computer users starting their computers Monday morning and seeing their new goatse-themed desktop. Oh the lols...
mmmm...forbidden donut
So if people get worms like this by being dumb with their computers, just write a worm that 'maliciously' enforces the security that people should be following. If you do it right it should infect the same set of people.
Not being very knowledgeable in this area I don't know if this idea actually means anything or if its ridiculous enough to be funny.
My webcomic
How sad is it that we've got botnets we can't kill that hang on long enough to have names like glaciers?
O my God, run it has got self aware
well, actually you got a point but you come at it from the wrong angle.
The problem is that thanks to the net, EVERY COMPUTER IS THE SAME. Internet capable...
Effecticly, this is to sexually transmitted virusses as all of us screwing everyone else at the same. The internet is a gangbang of computers.
What this leads to is that no matter how obscure your OS and the bugs on it, someone somewhere will know about it and have, thanks to the sheer size of the net, have thousands if not hundreds of thousands of targets.
There may not be many amiga's left but if they were all infected, it would still be a nice botnet.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1478#comic
in the end, just a waste of time.
They should use conflicker to install Linux to all infected Windows machine. LOL.
I think your anglophobic ranting has blinded you to the OP's statement and argument.
There's nothing anglophobic about it.
First off, I'm not expressing any kind of fear, therefor, there's no phobia. In fact, if someone says, they do not like gays, whites, or spiders, they are not homophobic, white-o-phobic, or spider-phobic. Dislike is not caused by fear. So let's burst that bubble.
Secondly, merely stating history is, well, telling the truth. The British treated the Irish like dirt for a long time. I think they are a super ally to the USA and I would exclude them from any vision I have of an American withdrawal from NATO... the Continent can go do what it will, but the USA should always stand beside the UK just as much as the UK has stood beside us... not only in Iraq, but also in the Pacific during late WWII..
This is my sig.
You're new here, aren't you?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I'm sure these guys are vulnerable..
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/26/149209
Submarines and gunboats running windows could easily have their network infected and will all be subject to zero-day vulnerabilities which is what these advanced botnets are starting to take advantage of.
http://news.google.com/news?q=power+infiltrate
With the possibilitiy of the power grid being infiltrated, it highlights that you need little more than a USB memory stick on an internal network to be infected.
-Tim
Even with bittorrent...
1) Booting when no network available?
2) Spread viruses even faster if one or more of the seed machines is infected?
3) Microsoft's new revenue model..
1- Get people to download a new os each boot
2- Be the only place to get it from
3- Begin charging for each boot
4- Profit
Wow ! Thanks! I didnt know that.
I'm going back to bed now...
I'm beginning to find it enormously frustraing that people, regardless of the topic, continue to piss and moan about problems that there is no realistic solution to. Whaa, the economy is bad, but people are too PC to put a significant Import tariff in effect, to balance out the "cost savings" of shipping our industries overseas. People complain about gun violence, but don't allow DC to ban handguns in the city (since there is SOOO much hunting on the Mall).
This is the same scenario. You can't create a secure environment for networking computers because you need to have a set series of standards so that they can all communicate. You also can't put the genie back in the bottle, and take the prevalence away from Internet usage. So what are you left with? A set of systems that are easily exploited because they are all set to comprehend a common set of instructions.
Why don't we quit the whining, and do away with this assinine concept of security, and understand that sandboxing, and ONLY sandboxing, will ensure the integrity of your valuable system's information and applications. That's it, so instead of worrying about being "secure" why not make it so nothing that can be gained from being exploited is worth the hassle?
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
When you realize you are uncontrollably in love with someone? That you and this person sitting beside you are soul mates? That you were meant for each other?
That moment for me came a few weeks ago. Yes, my wife and I have been married several years, but she was a Windows user when we met. Sure, she'd grown up in a diverse family - both Macs and PCs, but most of her experience was on Windows.
About a year ago I replaced Windows with Ubuntu on the family laptop. She kind of grudgingly went along with it.
Then, last week we were watching the news when the anchor broke the story of conficker. Without missing a beat, she turned to me and in roll-your-eyes-I-can't-believe-they're-so-stupid kind of voice said:
"That's a Windows thing, isn't it?"
"Yep," I replied.
"Hmmm. Sucks to be them, I guess..."
Linux evangelists take note: sometimes it takes people *years* to come around. But when they do, when they realize they no longer have to WORRY about viruses and other Windows-specific crap, it's priceless.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
No, this is Slashdot. And as you proved so eloquently yourself, you don't need to add anything relevant/funny/smart to the conversation to join in.
"But this one goes to 11!"
"One could argue that computing and the Internet would not be as ubiquitous as they are today without having had a defacto standard"
There is a defacto standard, it's called TCP/IP, SMTP and HTML
"There is an even stronger argument at the cost savings to businesses and governments in not having to train and retrain new employees on how to use numerous computer systems"
Invoking the ole cost of training FUD, I see
According to DELL 'the fundamental approach to the design and use of Desktop Computers has not changed in 30 years'
davecb5620@gmail.com
If you look at the facts the conficker virus and waladac botnet are CLEARLY parts of a vast left wing conspiracy which is obviously fronted by obama because the democrats want to take as much of your processing power as they do your income
But the truth is that the Obamanauts efforts have been secretly subverted by Cheney's government sleeper agents so that the extra CPU cycles can be used to run nuclear simulations for the next generation of mini-nukes!
/and of course, the reptilians are running the whole show.
"Yeah, because obviously the answer is to have a hundred different systems with a hundred different sets of vulnerabilities. That will be much easier to keep patched"
Well, at least then things like Conficker would be stopped dead in their tracks, and a vulnerability in a particular system wouldn't lead to the kind of thing like the currrent virus/spam/phishing epidemic.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Incidentally the British didn't deliberately starve the people - after they'd woken up to the trouble, they did ship in large amounts of aid and close the ports to food exports.
As you say, there has been a great deal of bunk written about the Hunger in Ireland in the late 1840s. However, you may have added to it.
Irish ports were closed to food exports in the previous famine in 1783, but not at any time in the 1840s or 1850s. Ireland remained an exporter of food (mostly grain & cattle) in great quantity during the Hunger. What food aid arrived in Ireland was the result of charities, not the British government. In fact, the British attempted to prevent food aid from arriving from some other countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Irish_Famine
There was also a lesser famine in Scotland at the same time, caused by the same over-reliance on potatoes which were hit by potato blight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Potato_Famine This caused great hardship in the Highlands, but food aid provided directly by the British government meant there were relatively few deaths from starvation or malnutrition-related diseases.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Or it's a left wing plot hatched by Obama and Apple to sell more Macs and jump start the economy.
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
Now that we're talking about car thieves;
Once my car's fuel pump was busted, and I had been working with it since I tried in vain to start it.
I accidentally left the keys in the ignition at night when I went in, and in the morning we had a visitor, who asked, "what happened to your car?" "Something happened?" says me, only then spotting the empty bay in front of the garage door (not really visible from inside).
You imagine I was a little puzzled. There was no fuel pump in the car. How in heck had they driven off with it? Without really knowing what I was doing I started walking around the neighborhood, thinking they can't have gotten too far...
About 150 yards out, around the corner, there was the car, complete with the keys in the ignition (including my house keys - how's that for stupid?), the hood still unlatched, with no other sign of tampering but a dirty palm print on the white hood.
Turned out somebody had been waiting for us to go to bed. We had been sitting up till 2 AM right above the car bay, talking by an open window in the balmy summer weather. Whoever it was, had waited under the neighbor's shelter, smoking a crapload of cigarettes (~100 butts) - and taken a crap - to pass the time, then pushing the car out far enough so we wouldn't hear the starter grind.
Big fat reward there. I hope they had a sense of humor! (I kind of figure if they didn't have one, they would have vandalized the car to "get back".)
A bit offtopic, but I think it makes a good story.
Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy and wrong. Selling our Liberty for a little Security is a much too de
Nobody is going to post the obvious "SkyNet Lives" comment?
What kind of geeks are you (we)?
This is how Microsoft explains Conficker to the home user: Protect yourself from the Conficker computer worm
Rather well done, I think.
Many a truth is spoken in jest:
The elephant in the room is "games." If you buy a computer for fun, you probably want to play games on it, and you'll quickly learn that most halfway decent games don't run on OS X.
Apple also seems to be addressing the wrong end of the market. It's producing multi-thousand dollar machines when it's the bottom end of the market -- filled with low cost laptops and netbooks that cost a few hundred dollars -- that's on fire at the moment.
Apple's sales proposition seems to come down to this:
* Windows is for boring business people, while OS X is for everyone else. Unless they want to play games. Or they don't want to pay inflated prices. Or they notice that there are far, far more applications to choose from on a PC than there are on a Mac.
* OS X can do business too -- but not as well as a PC. But don't worry, you can buy Windows and run it on your Mac. Then it's just as good as a PC, just much more expensive.
* OS X is really secure, although actually it turns out that it's not ...
So it's not really that surprising Reuters reported unit sales of computers running OS X fell 16 percent in February, according to research group NPD, while Windows PC sales leaped 22 percent. Within that overall figure, MacBook laptops dropped 7 percent, while Windows laptops rose 16 percent. Windows desktops had a hard time in February, with sales down 10 percent, but OS X suffered even more with unit sales down a staggering 36 percent.
Apple's Challenges: Gaming to Security [April 8, 2009]
The other nineteen twentieths mostly write it day/month or day/month/year, in the so-called "little-endian" form. The ISO 8601 standard is the "big-endian form" year-month-day which is used in a few countries.
"A few countries" like Canada, Mongolia, Japan, both Republics of Korea, and both Republics of China. The use of forms like "2009-04-01" especially in East Asia takes a big chunk out of "the other nineteen twentieths", and you end up with a lot more than one twentieth who put the 4 before the 1.
there will be viruses because people, dammit, want to see the dancing bunnies.
That's what virtual machines are for. Run your personal entertainment in a separate folder from your business, and viruses that land in your entertainment VM can't easily cross to the business VM. Jeff Atwood agrees with me.
I was going to look through this and moderate, but you've saved me the trouble! this is exactly the type of cooperative community-minded effort that we so need.