April 1 has come and gone in some parts of the world, and the Conficker worm is still here. While the day in security passed by relatively uneventfully, there are still people at risk.The doomsday some were predicting the Conficker worm to bring had not
materialized as of the evening of April 1. But that hardly means Conficker is a
bust.
In short, the
Conficker worm did what was expectedgenerate 50,000 domain names and begin
contacting them. According to BKIS, the Bach Khoa Internetwork Security center,
1.1 million PCs in Europe, Asia
and a part of America
infected with Conficker have already "called home."
But even though nothing dramatic happened, AVG Technologies Chief Research
Officer Roger Thompson warned
against blowing the worm off.
"We expect that they have achieved their aim of building a fairly
bulletproof botnet, and will now simply farm it, which means they'll probably
harvest credit card numbers, bank accounts and identities from as many victims
as possible, and then do it all again," Thompson said.
While the attention Conficker has generated may make infecting new computers
difficult for the worm, those that are already infected are still targets
for malicious activity, he noted. Though there are Conficker
detection tools available, the worm does attempt to fool administrators
into thinking they are not vulnerable by deploying a fake
patch for the Microsoft vulnerability Conficker exploits.
To Thompson, the situation represents the natural evolution of botnetsand the
consequence of the game of Whac-A-Mole played by the security industry.
"First, there were regular botnets, and they were getting shut down, so
they tried making bulletproof hosting, which also got shut down," he said.
"So they developed the idea of fast-flux botnets for command and control
and then double-fast flux, and now Conficker."
More than functionality, it was the sheer number of PCs infected by
Conficker that attracted so much attention. Though the exact number of
compromised computers varies according to who is being asked, the general
consensus is that millions of computers are still infected with Conficker
despite the existence of removal and detection tools and a patch for the
Microsoft vulnerability it targets. The compromised PCs could constitute one of
the largest botnets ever.
"The whole purpose [of] botnets [is] to make money," said Jeff
Shipley, security researcher for Cisco IntelliShield. "Either through
spam or compromising data such as unauthorized access to credit card numbers
and other critical data, botnets are a big underground business. Criminal
usage of botnets is hugein the billions of dollars."
There is also the possibility of selling Conficker's army of infected
computers, but that could prove problematic due to the amount of attention it
generated. Right now, countless members of the security community, including
the Conficker Cabalformally known as the Conficker Working Groupare keeping
tabs on the worm. Even with 50,000 domains in question, those domains are being
closely monitored and any malicious servers will likely be noticed before long.
"Given the profile of Conficker, I think it's rather unlikely that the
botnet is up for sale," said Roel Schouwenberg, senior anti-virus
researcher at Kaspersky Lab Americas. "Not a lot of people out there would
like to handle such hot property, as the botnet is being watched by a lot of
people. However, leasing [parts of] the botnet is a different story. That way
the leasers would get the advantage of the power of the botnet, but the owners
would still be running the risk."
Editor's
Note: This story was updated to
add information later supplied by BKIS on the number of infected computers it
detected.