Viruses/Worms News

Conficker worm could be 'weaponized,' web security researcher warns

Monday, November 2, 2009

In the year since the inception of the Conficker worm, a malicious strain of virus that has infected computers all over the globe, security researchers have tracked its spread to as many as 7 million machines.

Although internet security researchers at the Conficker Working Group advise that it is impossible to track the exact number of PCs infected by Conficker, the latest estimates put the worm's spread at around the 7 million mark, a milestone in the making of a huge botnet, according to Computerworld.

Botnets are controlled by hackers, cyber criminals or sometimes governments for the purpose of launching spam, malware and distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS), which can overpower website servers with malicious traffic that slows or crashes websites.

As an element of cyber war, DDOS attacks require a large enough botnet to overpower defenses, according to security experts. Andre DiMino, co-founder of The Shadowserver Foundation, said a botnet the size of Conficker could be "weaponized" in a cyber attack.

"This is certainly a botnet that could be weaponized," DeMino said, according to Computerworld. "When you have a net of this magnitude, the sky's the limit in terms of what could be done."

DDOS attacks launched last July shut down government, banking and commercial sites in the U.S. and South Korea. Smaller attacks have hit sites like Twitter, Facebook and news websites.