Saturday, March 28, 2009

Reflections 18. Conficker , flickr and other malaises

The Conficker worm is awaiting new orders from the "masters" on the Fool's day this year. The worm was first identified in the "wild" back in October 2008, since then he was propagating in the Internet, occasionally updating himself with the new versions. Close to 10 mln computers around the world are suspect to be infected by the worm. Most of the infected computers are part of the bigger networks in governments and corporations and not the private PC. It was leaked that even UK Parlament network might be infected. Microsoft issued numerous warnings and offered a sweet bounty of 250k US$ to help her find authors of the worm. Aside from the usual ways of infecting computers connected to the Internet, this worm is also able to exploit autorun feature set for USB removable devices.




On the other hand

Ed Amoroso, Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer of AT&T, told a Congressional Committee on 20 March that cybercrime was a $1trn a year business.

Good call to ask the question is it a slipped gaffe or intentional act ? Good exercise to train a public for accepting numbers of trillions dollars through official sources.
I'm not that much paranoic person but trillions make me trembling, no matter trillions of what be it a cyber crime dollars or american bailouts... People are absolutely out of touch how really mind boggling that number is. Quoting from wikipedia

The million is sometimes used in the English language as a metaphor for a very large number, as in "Never in a million years" and "You're one in a million", or a hyperbole, as in "I've walked a million miles".


Now, trillion is million times million. It is a basic math but sometimes you ought to use those skills taught in kinder garten :)

It is almost for sure that this number is highly exaggerated, you may read about the origins of the meme here.

According to market research firm Gartner, all the software business revenues worldwide expected to total $222.6bn in 2009 only.

7 comments:

Cher Duncombe said...

Last month I added to that sum by purchasing corporate-strength anti-virus software after my computer was infected. I have also wondered whether this is a scam to goad us into buying more software. For me the answer was easy. With more than 20 million blogs added per day to the blogosphere, you cannot be too careful. There are malintents out there. It bites, but it's true. At least I feel a bit safer now. I suppose tomorrow will tell the tale with this smarmy worm.

MechApe said...

20 mln blogs per day is unrealistic number :) Besides it is not important at all how many blogs created for the overall security on the internet.

I myself running on Linux and one very customizable distro - Gentoo.
Security by obscurity :)

Anonymous said...

does it say how to get rid of this worm or what program to get to see if you have it?

MechApe said...

Miranda, bear in mind that I'm not IT security expert.

Here is the tool which i found quickly googling http://www.sophos.com/products/free-tools/conficker-removal-tool.html

I'm not affiliated with this security firm.

HawgWyld said...

That thing is driving our IT guy nuts. He claims that updated virus software and "not doing anything stupid" (i.e., surfing for porn, hitting the more shady torrent sites and opening weird email attachments) is enough to keep from being infected with this thing.

Guess we'll find out tomorrow if he's right, huh?

The Hawg!

MechApe said...

There are oficcial MS technical instructions about rewmoval Conficker.B worm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962007

Also this page http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/Entry.aspx?Name=Win32/Conficker summarizes the whole Conficker family

Dr.Bruce said...

It is amazing how vulnerable the average computer user is to malicious software like this. What is even more amazing is how vulnerable out supposedly secure operations are.

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