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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."
No. It is the only news.
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
I think the Conficker was going for the clichéd horror film approach. Granted, it should have really done it on April 2nd but doing it this way has probably blind sided more people.
Summation 2
This is an extremely interesting development. One potential explanation is a DDoS attack from infected machines. Another option is simple coincidence and a technical problem with their hosting server.
I suspect the former, but hope it's the latter.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
or it's been slashdotted...
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.
I think your anglophobic ranting has blinded you to the OP's statement and argument.
[emphasis added]
The reliance on a single product - the potato - was unquestionably one of the major factors behind the famine. The fact that this reliance had socio-political factors as its root cause is totally besides the point. The fact is that the poorest people were reliant on the ubiquitous crop as their winter staple, and that ubiquity is what allowed one blight to cause such devastation. As you said yourself, it was all they had.
It's a good analogy, and you've needlessly muddied the waters by misreading and over-extending the OP's point.
Your suggestion that opposing open-source is a necessary step in increasing OS variety is weird and baseless. I'll grant you that completely free trade (as in "without restriction") would facilitate monopoly-practice and in turn engender a monoculture, which is how we found ourself in the current mess.
To suggest open-source development discourages variety though...? Wow. What's your reasoning behind that posit?
Meta will eat itself
The parts of the Windows mainland who install security patches are also amused. I'm sure we'll all be amused right up until the Internet we all share with the infected losers goes all wonky.
I have never understood that stupid song. Everything she lists is unfortunate, or inconvenient, but not a single one is actually ironic. Maybe that's the irony. Or maybe that word doesn't mean what Alanis thinks it means.
"But this one goes to 11!"
The irony is that a song called "Ironic" is not ironic.
But wait, that would mean the song is ironic after all. Which of course means that it isn't.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Pudding can't fill the emptiness inside my heart. But it'll help.
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
See also: making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs
"But this one goes to 11!"