Conficker Is Down But Not Out
The much dreaded Conficker, which ruined many a sleep, has faded away completely from public memory. However, Trend Micro’s Malware Blog and Conficker statistics do not agree with this.
Conficker is a worm that grabbed the attention of the Netizens at the beginning of this year. It occupied much web space due to its high infection rate; part of it was just hype. After the much talked about April Fool’s Day threat went undetected, it slowly started losing its stranglehold on the web world. People started forgetting the ruckus created by Conficker.
However, it looks like this is not the case. Conficker Working Group statistics draw a different picture. The destructive seeds sowed by the first two variants of Conficker had infected quite a few unique IPs. They were bouncing around for some time and resurfaced prominently by the end of month May. It is seeing an exponential increase after this. May 31st recorded 3.7 million, which reached 5.1 million by June end.
Trend’s figures are much realistic at 1.2 million recorded infections, which is not at all low for botnet. The inventors of Conficker used it as a fake anti-virus program. A botnet has the ability to steal confidential data from PCs and make money for its creator, by sending spam messages.
Though it is still not clear, whether it will pose the same threat as its earlier version, Conficker is not to be forgotten. There are ways to ensure the safety of your PC from a Conficker threat and ways to check your PC for the botnet infection.