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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."
Bots and spammers typically wait for the holiday weekends; like playing your starters against their backups.
also it looks like http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/ is down
Everyone was expecting that and was prepared for it. A week later, everyone's forgotten about it. Also with this timing if something starts going wrong now it will be difficult to get anyone to fix it until Tuesday.
to be fair, the British government didn't deliberately starve the Irish, instead they were proponents of 'free market forces'. They didn't have supermarkets or microwave readymeals in those days, so a staple foodstuff like the potato was pretty much all you ate anyway. Of course, if you were rich you could afford meat - like the cattle raised in Ireland for English tables. The landlords got richer and the poor stayed poor.
The trouble was that the blight reduced the number of potatoes in circulation, and as other people were richer, they could afford to pay more - and so the farmers shipped their potatoes to the richer people, leaving the peasants to starve. As has always been the way.
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. Too late for most of course, but don't get incompetence confused with conspiracy.
There's been too much FUD about the potato famine, I suppose spread for modern political reasons. The truth is just dull, the government took a 'light touch' approach to the markets. Unfortunately this approach to 'hands off' free-trade doesn't give what society requires, with such lax input from governments, the free market doesn't always work correctly and you have monopolies appearing and abusing the freedom that should be providing a better set of choices. For computers, its no good saying "you could run Linux" if everyone needs to run Windows because of the ubiquity of software running on it.
Protectionism is the last thing you want, when you get that, you invite stagnation. There's no innovation of growth, the established parties simply try to maintain their market with what they've got. Developing new products is a significant cost - and without free trade getting in the way and allowing new entrants to the market, there's no incentive to spend. Of course you might get new upstarts appearing, but that happens so rarely, and most of them are small and get killed off by the established big players either by being bought out (name any MS product really) or having their market destroyed (eg IE v Netscape).
Ultimately the government needs to step in and support open standards, making sure everyone works with them. Then you can have much better spread of heterogeneous systems as they would work together, giving people the ability to choose an alternative to the dominant product.
That is the definition of 'security through obscurity'. I would not want to run an insecure system and hope to be safe because nobody else had heard about it. True security means using well-known and peer-reviewed code (but not 'well known to be crap').
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Except in such a case you just have to exploit one box and you get access to the rest. There went all your brilliant planning and schemes.
No, you would probably just get access to the one box (and others identical to it). You generally would not get access to the other boxes, unless they share essentially the same vulnerability. GP's point was that a monoculture can be devastated by a single assault, but a mixed ecosystem is much more difficult to damage severely.
Minor clarification of GP post: the potato crop in Ireland in the 1840s was dominated by a single variety of potato - the Lumper - which exacerbated the effect of a single strain of potato blight. The equivalent in computers would be all PCs running the same version of Windows with the same selection of programs, patches and protections: a disaster waiting to happen.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire