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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!
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.
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
Conficker gets it's time from a lot of different time servers, not the local machine. I think the author might have thought about that when designing the worm...
Conficker doesn't use the internal system clock; it polls various websites to find out the real date.
If it can't connect to those websites, or gets an unexpected response, it assumes it's in a closed network and holes up.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Why didn't someone infected with this, say last month, change their pc clock ahead...
First of all, I'm sure that the payload itself wasn't made available until the last minute.
Second, if it were me who wrote the virus, I would have written it to *start* looking for a payload, start looking in no particular place, and continue looking until it's been found. Considering that it's getting its payload from an established botnet, it could just be poking around looking for machines that can give it its payload and the payload wasn't made available until today.
When you have control of as many machines as the Storm or Waledac botnets, the world really is your oyster. You're not restricted by IPs, and if your botnet is large enough, you can just iterate through addresses looking for a system that has your payload for you. Without access to the botnet or the payload, it doesn't matter how much you reverse engineer or adjust your clock, you just can't predict what will happen in the future.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
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.
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.
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.