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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."
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!
No. It is the only news.
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/
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.
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
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
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.
You are correct that there are only one Linux kernel, but there are other free UNIX kernels you could use instead. When it comes to compilers both LLVM and GCC are widely used. (LLVM is used in Gallum3D, the new acceleration architecture for X, and in Shark, a CPU agnostic JIT for OpenJDK. A C frontend not based on GCC is in development) There are many shells. Ubuntu, a quite popular Linux distro, actually uses dash as default /bin/sh. While it's true that only OpenJDK (if I recall correctly) passes the TCK for Java you also have competing implementations like Harmony, what Google uses on Android. You have more competition on the parts of the Java stack that takes less time to implement.
Spelling/grammar nazis welcome (English is not my first language and I am trying to improve my spelling/grammar)
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.
Protectionism worked for the US from the 1800's all the way up till the 1980's. We got to the moon using protectionism as an economic tool. I'm just saying.
There is a war going on for your mind.
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
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
...and using 4096-bit signing to authenticate anything tossed in the windows.