The Big Bad Worm of 2009

The Big Bad Worm of 2009 - Conficker

Been hearing about this worm since November 2008. The researchers have found that it may have a payload that it may unleash today. Not sure how bad it could be, depending on all those un-patched machines out there in the wild.

So what does it do.... It has a very interesting payload and we have already seen more than 4 variants. Interestingly it looks like they let version A and B to check on how the community is going to respond. The cabal to counter its domain generation algorithm got a new lease and a new algorithm in the C version and also contains a p2p communication mechanism. The other part is how a digital signatures can be used effectively to control the compromised host. This is important to protect other bot commanders to take over the already compromised Conficker bots.

Network traces have not yielded much, but looks like it is a widely distributed system which has already started pushing the latest DLL updates across to the already compromised machines. Lets look at the changes we may perceive from the new variant today. The variant is supposed to have a payload that is activated on April 1st.

An interesting and well researched article on the conficker C variant

http://mtc.sri.com/Conficker/addendumC/

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