Conficker threat isn’t over

The Conficker worm is on the move again: After a relatively uneventful April 1, on which the worm began widening the number of web sites that it scanned for instructions, a new Conficker variant has emerged and appears to be preparing to spam and steal information, reports InformationWeek. The Conficker worm was designed initially to exploit a Microsoft Windows vulnerability that was patched last October. Since then, it has been updated several times. It now is capable of multiple attack vectors, including USB devices and brute-force password guessing. It also uses various advanced techniques to escape detection and to maintain its command-and-control channel, including a pseudo-random algorithm for generating the domains it uses to receive commands. Somewhere between 1 million and 2 million computers are believed to be actively infected with the malware, down from almost 9 million in January…

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