Back in April of this very year, Conficker was poised to take over the world. That is if the evil masterminds behind it decided to push the button. Well, although Conficker is continuing it’s push onto the desktops of the unprotected, it seems that there is not much going on behind the botnet.
According to security researchers at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, the botnet has around 5.5 million active IPs, and those IPs are mainly based in Brazil, China, and Vietnam. It has been spreading autonomously a few ways, ether scanning networks for infectable machines, or being passed on via USB sticks.
Considering the ever expanding nature of Conficker, and the potential for mischeif, why have we not seen a huge DDoS attacks on websites, alleviated for money? Or a theft of credit card details on a massive scale? Or simply Conficker receiving updated instructions from the botmasters? Well, according to researchers at the conference, the project is on the back burner at the moment. Although some of the researchers were more backward in coming forward about Conficker, and its current direction.
So we can all breath a sigh of relief then? Good God no. Although Conficker has not come to life just yet doesn’t mean it won’t. I can’t believe that all this work would go to waste, or that such a success would just be dropped. But you could argue that that success is indeed why it may be dropped. If you want to perform cyber crime on a large scale, would you use such an obvious tool?
All usual advice still applies, don’t open attachments, don’t do this, and don’t do that.
One thought on “Confickers lights are on, but is anyone home?”
This is one heck of a worm and its scary how much potential damage it could do. I can’t understand why hackers would goto such lenghts just to show what they can do. Surely the hackers will try to make money from it somehow as there is a lot of effort still going into making this beast a monster.
I shall watch this space with great interest.