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Has Conficker Been Abandoned By Its Authors?

darthcamaro writes "Remember Conficker? April first doom and gloom and all? Well apparently after infecting over five million IP addresses, it's now an autonomous botnet working on its own without any master command and control. Speaking at the Black Hat/Defcon Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at security firm F-Secure, was told not to talk in detail about the Conficker gang — the problem is that not all researchers were under the same gag order. Just ask Roel Schouwenberg, senior anti-virus researcher at security firm Kaspersky, who says 'The Conficker botnet is autonomous; that is very strange in itself that they made Conficker replicate by itself. Now it seems like the authors have abandoned the project, but because it is autonomous, it can do whatever it wants and it keeps on trying to find new hosts to infect.'"

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  1. Re:so where are they now? by interkin3tic · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Or maybe the inventors were just too conficked about the ethics of it all.

    I myself feel a little conficked about using that particular pun. Or maybe the extreme nausea I'm feeling is from this hot pocket...