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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.'"
10. They were just a bunch of students making a cool experiment that got out of hands. Once they realised that the problems started when they tried to make money out of it - since the feds could follow the money trail - they abandoned it. This is also why it did not carry a harmful payload for a long time and why the only malicious payload quickly self-destructed itself. 11. It really is the creation of some TLAs somewhere, from Mossad to CIA or FSB or the Secret Service of Trinidad & Tobago or such. This is why Conficker dropped real malicious payload only for a short time: if you want to have a large army of bots to attack other nations in the case of war, it does not make sense to drop a malicious payload - you don't want to go through the hassle of actually making some money, but you can't afford someone to find this out; also, you do not want to destroy or harm your bots hosts or make your bot appear more dangerous to their host maintainers than necessary since they might put more effort into removing your bot. But not deploying any malicious payload at all turned out to spark all sorts of speculations and media interest so they had to make Conficker drop a plausible payload that self-destructed after a short while. 12. Some mafia guys though of hiring a bunch of experts for the development of the perfect and most advanced botnet and it all worked fine. Until they realized that this one perfect botnet created thousands of times the media and police attraction that all other bots preceding them combined. So as then any Security researcher, every cyber-crime unit and any self-proclaimed virus hunter was watching them they abandoned the project and instead returned to deploying hundreds of less effective smaller-scale bots that also got them loads of money but no media attention instead.