An analysis by Kaspersky Lab has identified roughly 200,000 unique IPs participating in Conficker's peer-to-peer network. That number, however, only represents a small portion of those affected by the worm.Has the number of Conficker infections been overhyped? Not necessarily.
New research
by Kaspersky Lab has put the aforementioned question back in the spotlight.
While the Conficker worm generated an intense amount of public interest, the
number of computers infected with the newest variant of the worm seems to be
relatively small.
Kaspersky Lab's analysis revealed just over 200,000 unique IP addresses
were participating in Conficker's peer-to-peer network (P2P).
While analysing Kido [Conficker] network behaviour weve been able to
develop an application that helped us to get an in depth insight into the
peer-to-peer network communications of the malware, which have been used to
distribute updates over the last week, blogged Georg Wicherski, a virus
analyst at the security company. Over a 24 hour observation period, weve been
able to identify 200,652 unique IPs participating in the network, far less then
initial estimated Kido infection counts.
However, Kaspersky Lab Senior Antivirus Researcher Roel Schouwenberg
noted this is just the number of computers the company detected participating
in the P2P network. The total number of infected machines is still in the
millions, Schouwenberg told eWEEK.
At various points, vendors have put the number as high as 9 million, but
efforts by the security community such as The Conficker Working Group seem to
have paid off. However, the group still puts the current number of unique
IPs infected with variants
A, B and C at roughly 3.6 million.
Only a fraction of the nodes infected with earlier variants appear to have
been updated, according to Wicherskis blog post. Kasperskys analysis also
found that the highest concentration of infected machines is in Brazil,
China and the
eastern part of the United States,
which is reminiscent of similar findings from IBMs X-Force earlier
this month.
The latest iteration of the worm has been tied to a scheme to trick
users into downloading rogue anti-virus. There
are a number of tools available to help victims remove and detect the
malware, as well as a patch
for the Microsoft vulnerability targeted by multiple versions of the worm.