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Was Conficker Stuxnet's Trojan?

Posted by Soulskill on from the malware-voltron dept.

Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters has published a provocative article describing the findings of cyberwarfare expert John Bumgarner, a former Army intelligence officer. His contention is that Conficker identified targets, then opened the door for Stuxnet. 'His analysis challenges a common belief that Conficker was built by an Eastern European criminal gang to engage in financial fraud. The worm's latent state had been a mystery for some time. It appears never to have been activated in the computers it infected, and security experts have speculated that the program was abandoned by those who created it because they feared getting caught after Conficker was subjected to intense media scrutiny. If confirmed, Bumgarner's work could deepen understanding of how Stuxnet's commanders ran the cyber operation that last year sabotaged an underground facility at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are enriching uranium using thousands of gas centrifuges.'"

2 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Macbook by The+Raven · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No current operating system is immune to exploits. An accurate statement would be 'I use apple because their low population in the wild makes them unpopular targets for malware authors to write exploits for'.

    --
    "I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
  2. Get the FUD Out of Here. by shuttah · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm doubting this story.

    Admittingly, the following two clues as to who the author(s) of Conficker are, are circumstantial, but i would like to offer them to you guys for consideration since this behavior from Conficker has been observed and documented -

    1.

    "Once Conficker [A] infects a system, it includes a keyboard layout check, via the GetKeyboardLayout API, to determine whether the victim is currently using the Ukrainian keyboard layout. If so, [A] will exit without infecting the system. This suicide exit scheme has been observed in other malware-related software, such as Baka Software's Antivirus XP Trojan installer."

    The suggestion is that Conficker's author(s) were trying to avoid violating the local laws of their native country. Presumably Ukraine (who's laws concerning computer crime seem to have several loopholes).

    Source

    2.

    In a honeynet, there was a connection observed of the [B] variant of Conficker using variant [A]'s protocol to take over a machine already infected with Variant [A]... so it was Conficker trying to replace variant [A] with Variant [B]. For several reasons (located in the source link below), it is suggested the packet captured was an instance of Conficker testing it's own robust nature to not be taken over by another author or virus.

    The significance of this is the "hybrid" packet described above came from an address owned by, again, Baka Software in the Ukraine.

    Source