The Birth and Battle of Conficker

NewScientist has an interesting look back at the birth of the Conficker worm and how this sophisticated monster quickly grew to such power and infamy. "Since that flurry of activity in early April, all has been uneasily quiet on the Conficker front. In some senses, that marks a victory for the criminals. The zombie network is now established and being used for its intended purpose: to make money. Through its peer-to-peer capabilities, the worm can be updated on the infected network at any time. It is not an unprecedented situation. There are several other large networks of machines infected with malicious software. Conficker has simply joined the list. The security community will continue to fight them, but as long as the worm remains embedded in any computer there can be no quick fixes."

Comments

"Watch me" service

[davidwr]

If your ISP provided a free service where it would text or phone you and offer to help clean up your systems if it detected malware-ish behavior coming from your computer or network, would you sign up?

The only gotcha is that you would be inviting the ISP to watch your traffic.

OK, this is slashdot, so most people would say "no," but how many regular people would say "yes" and would that make much of a difference?

Re:Correction

[CAIMLAS]

There are more than you think. Old home computers are quickly becoming Linux computers.

There are a lot of independent techs out there who service the lion's share of home computers. Yes, Best Buy and the like get a lot, too. But they can't compete on quality service with the little guy (due to overhead), so they have to keep themselves going through quantity.

I know a handful "home computer techs" - people who work out of their house or have a small one-room office somewhere. They're making ends meet and keeping their families going by doing this while at the same time putting linux on computers that are only mildly useful for anything beyond XP (and sometimes even XP, eg. 256Mb RAM).

More often than not, the system is in need of a reinstall anyway due to some combination of users messing them up and malware. It's like scoring a 3-pointer at the buzzer, in terms of removing an infection vector.

I'm one such person, while I'm unemployed. I'd say maybe one out of 5 of the computers that come to me leave with Linux installed. Those satisfied customers then refer their friends and family. Not much repeat service, but quite a few referrals. It would also appear that people are oddly appreciative for preventing them from installing all that crap as well - "it just works nice and fast and there are no pop-ups".

Not only that, but when someone upgrades their computer (and they've got the proclivity to tinker) they'll do something with the old one. Linux has picked up a lot of mindshare, and I know many of the so called "tech savvy" types (who still need someone who knows what they're doing on occasion when they can't recover or get stuck) are doing this.