Gizmodo - It's lurking in millions of PCs around the world. It's incredibly sophisticated and resilient, with built-in p2p and digital code-signing technology. It revels in killing security software. On April 1, the Conficker worm will activate.
The scariest thing about the Conficker worm is that literally millions of infected Windows PCs could be linked together to do its bidding. The second scariest thing is that no one really knows what its creator is going to do with this virtual army on April 1, when it's scheduled to contact a server for instructions. It's so bad, Microsoft has a running $250,000 bounty for the author, dead or alive. (Well, they probably want him alive, but they hate his guts.)
The New York Times' John Markoff rounded up some of the more ingeniously evil possibilities in a compelling article, the most sinister being a "Dark Google," postulated by University of California at San Diego researcher Stefan Savage, that would let bad people scour zombie machines all around the world for data to sell to other bad people.
But let's back up a bit. Conficker—whose weird name is a combination of "configuration" and a slightly more polite word for f***er, according to Urban Dictionary—actually began life as a lowly, "not very successful" worm in November, says Vincent Weafer, VP at Symantec Security Response. Weafer told us it exploited a Microsoft remote server vulnerability that had already been announced and patched the previous month, so the only systems that were vulnerable were the ones that weren't up to date.
The B release, pushed in December, on the other hand, was "wildly successful," says Weafer, infecting millions of unpatched computers because it's an aggressive little bastard—the first worm in years on a scale like Blaster. It has built-in p2p capabilities, and brute forces its way into open shared folders or printers, so it can crawl an office network quickly. It also piggybacks onto USB flash and hard drives. On top of all that, it's designed to be incredibly resilient, killing security software, disabling Windows Update, and digging down deep.
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