Search results for: "conficker"

Fake Conficker Alerts

Urban Schrott, IT Security & Cybercrime Analyst at ESET Ireland, reports seeing more e-mail pretending to be from Microsoft is circulating, "warning" computer users that "Conflicker" is again spreading rapidly. ESET's ThreatSense engine identifies the malware as Win32/Kryptik.CLU trojan, and running it would result in further malware infections. Here's an example Urban quotes of one

Potentially Abandoned Conficker Grows

According to an article at Internetnews.com http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3832846 the authors of the Conficker botnet may have abandoned it, yet it continues to grow in numbers. The growth of the botnet is troubling because it is completely preventable and because it means the infected computers are vulnerable to other threats and that these users are not using

Win32/Conficker.AQ: What’s in a Name?

Larry Seltzer, one of the better commentators on malware issues, has picked up on the disparity between ESET’s naming of the latest variant and Symantec’s – they call it W32.Downadup.E. Richard Adhikari (who also seems to pretty clueful) also picked up on the naming issue when we exchanged emails a few days ago. This issue

Conficker: rising and shining…

So now for a little more tech detail on Win32/Conficker.AQ (kindly supplied by Juraj Malcho at our labs in Europe – however, if I get anything wrong, that will almost  certainly be down to my faulty interpretation!) The new variant has two main components. The server component is an .EXE that infects vulnerable PC’s in

Confounded by Conficker: not so Dozy

If you just got here looking for my blog on Conficker and “blended hoaxes”, I’m afraid I just pulled it (temporarily at least) in the light of new data that’s come in since last night: I don’t want to mislead anyone, as it seems that the new Conficker stuff is a lot more active and

Not every Botnet is Conficker

If it was the intention of the Conficker gang to create a huge splash, they succeeded. (In fact, it’s quite possible that they’ve attracted more attention than they really wanted.) In any case, it seems that lots of people are looking nervously over their shoulders for any indication that something unpleasant and Conficker-related is about

Conficker: After the Flood, the Backlash

Good morning. Is there anyone still out there and connected? Thought so. While one or two people who comment here seem to think I’m personally responsible for developing, maintaining, and marketing ESET products (and in at least one case writing the malware as well) I’m afraid I didn’t spend April 1st crouched over a rack

Conficker: the rest is probably not silence

So, nothing happened? Well, yes. Our labs, who’ve been monitoring carefully, note that Conficker changed communication protocols, just as the code said it would. No doubt in the fullness of time, the botnet will start doing what botnets do: it would be bizarre to put this much effort into a project and then not try

Conficker Launches Cyber Attack Against Big Ben

In an apparent effort to cause British commuters to miss their trains, Chinese hackers have ordered the Conficker.C botnet to randomly change the time on the venerable and vulnerable Big Ben. This has caused millions of Londoners to be late for work this morning. Hey, this is no more ridiculous than trying to protect against

Catching Conficker – a New Development

I can already hear a chorus of “Not ANOTHER Conficker blog?”, but some of you will want to know about this development. The Honeynet Project has announced a new scanning tool for detecting Conficker, which gives network and system administrators a very handy extra tool for detecting Conficker activity on their networks. Furthermore, the tool

Conficker, Y2K, and Apocalypse Now

Around the end of the last decade, when I was working for a research organization in the UK, I used to write a monthly column on security for an in-house newspaper, and was rapped over the knuckles for telling this little story. I’ve probably changed the detail since then: I don’t keep everything I’ve written

Conficker Removal (Update)

[Update: it seems that people who missed the whole MS-DOS/having fun with the C> prompt and batchfiles thing are still struggling with the fact that vendors are releasing cleaning tools that are really command-line tools, so some step-by-step notes are added below.] I’m sure you’re almost as bored with this issue as I am with the

Conficker: Before the Flood (April Showers)

I don’t, of course, know for sure what’s going to happen on April 1st, when Conficker is timed, potentially, to go to its next stage of evolution. We do know, from inspecting code in the variants and subvariants that have come our way, that infected machines will be looking for instructions and updates on that date. At the very least,