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Rampant Conficker worm could crash global Internet | Technology experts worldwide are finding it "almost impossible" to defeat the Conficker worm, which has infected more than 5 million computers and could even knock down the internet in all countries. The worm, which was first detected in November last
year, spreads rapidly to computers through a flaw in the Windows operating system.
Infected machines are co-opted into a "botnet" army, which can be controlled and
used by the hackers to launch unprecedented cyber attacks. "The general agreement
in the security world is that Conficker is the largest threat facing us from a
cyber crime point of view ... it has proven to be extremely resilient. It's almost
impossible to remove," The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Rodney Joffe, a director
of the Conficker Working Group formed to defeat the worm, as saying. "The best
minds in the world have not managed to crack the code behind this yet," he added.
The threat is so dangerous that the world's largest computer security companies
have joined together with government around the world in an unusual alliance to
pool their resources and solve the problem. Microsoft has offered a 250,000 dollars
reward for information leading to the identification of the individuals - or rogue
governments - behind Conficker. The creators of the worm can do anything they
want with the infected machines including stealing users' banking details or flooding
government servers to knock them offline. So far the international effort to find
a solution has yielded few results, and the number of infected machines has remained
fairly stable at 5 million, which include home, business and Government computers.
Conflicker owes its remarkable resilience to its built-in mechanisms to prevent
people from scanning their computers with anti-virus software, said Joffe. Even
for those who wipe their computers clean and start fresh, if they back up any
important data on a portable hard drive, the clean machine is reinfected when
the drive is connected to the computer. The worm also spreads automatically between
computers on a network and infects machines without the user having to do anything
other than switch their computers on. Majority of the botnets can be destroyed
by disabling the server used to issue commands to infected machines, but with
Conficker the location of this sever changes every day and state-of-the-art cryptography
means it's almost impossible to crack. Every time the security gurus feel they
are on to a solution, the hackers send a new version of Conficker to the infected
machines that stops them in their tracks. "Conficker has proven to be the gold
standard for botnets. It's rock solid, it's steady and it has mechanisms built
in that have made it impossible for us to actually crack," said Joffe. "As of
today we have not been able to crack the cryptography behind it in order to disrupt
it by authenticating ourselves as the command and control," he added. |
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