The Conficker worm's April 1st trigger date came and went without the bedeviling computer virus causing any mischief but security specialists warn that the threat is far from over.
Conficker did just what the "white hats" tracking it expected -- the
virus evolved to better resist extermination and make its masters
tougher to find.
"There are still millions of personal computers out there that are, unknown to their owners, at risk of being controlled in the future by persons unknown," said Trend Micro threat researcher Paul Ferguson.
"The threat is still there. These guys are smart; they are not going to
pull any obvious strings when there are so many eyeballs on the
problem."
A task force assembled by Microsoft
has been working to stamp out the worm, referred to as Conficker or
DownAdUp, and the US software colossus has placed a bounty of 250,000
dollars on the heads of those responsible for the threat.
"It is pretty sophisticated and state-of-the-art," Ferguson said. "It
definitely looks like the puppet masters are located in Eastern Europe."
The worm was programmed to evolve on Wednesday to become harder to
stop. It began doing just that when infected machines got cues, some
from websites with Greenwich Mean Time and others based on local clocks.
The malicious software evolved from East to West, beginning in the first time zones to greet April Fools' Day.
Conficker had been programmed to reach out to 250 websites daily to
download commands from its masters, but on Wednesday it began
generating daily lists of 50,000 websites and reaching randomly 500 of
those.
The hackers behind the worm have yet to give the virus any specific
orders. An estimated one to two million computers worldwide are
infected with Conficker.
The worm, a self-replicating program, takes advantage of networks or
computers that haven't kept up to date with security patches for
Windows RPC Server Service.
It can infect machines from the Internet or by hiding on USB memory sticks carrying data from one computer to another.
Malware could be triggered to steal data or turn control of infected
computers over to hackers amassing "zombie" machines into "botnet"
armies.
"We're still watching to see what it's doing," said Ferguson, a member of the Conficker task force.
"A lot of us have our fingers crossed that people are getting rid of this."
Microsoft has modified its free Malicious Software Removal Tool to detect and remove Conficker. Security firms, including Trend Micro, Symantec and F-Secure, provide Conficker removal services at their websites.
The tell-tale signs that a computer is infected includes the worm
blocking efforts to connect with websites of security firms providing
online tools for removing the virus.
Conficker task force members have found a way to disable the block by typing in a few commands into computers.
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a tool on Monday to detect whether a computer is infected by Conficker.
The agency said the worm detector was developed by the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT).
"Our experts at US-CERT are working around the clock to increase our
capabilities to address the cyber risk to our nation's critical
networks and systems, both from this threat and all others," US-CERT
director Mischel Kwon said when the tool was released.
US-CERT recommended that Windows users apply Microsoft security patch MS08-067 to help protect against the worm.
"Life goes on," Ferguson said as the sun set on April Fools' Day
in California. "This system could still go off. Time will tell."
While Conficker has been in the spotlight, computer security specialists
are finding 10,000 new samples of malicious software daily and hundreds
of websites are spewing spam, some of it tainted with viruses,
according to Ferguson.
"There are plenty of threats out there," he said.
---- http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090402/tc_afp/usitinternetcrimesoftwareconfickermicrosoftlead
---- By by Glenn Chapman - Thu Apr 2, 2009 12:33AM EDT
