Just Like Y2K, Conficker Fears Fail To Materialize
It may remind some of Y2K. At the turn of the century, clocks around the world struck midnight and none of the fearful predictions about computer networks shutting down happened.
Fast-forward about nine years and the hype about Conficker appears to have been overinflated — at least so far. The media helped to spread Conficker doom and gloom over the past week as the world prepared for the malware authors to begin using a new algorithm to determine what domains to contact. That contact could set off a new rash of computer infections if vulnerable Windows operating systems have not been patched.
The Conficker worm, also know as Downadup, raced across the Internet in January with tricks to spread undetected. Millions of computers were infected in just a four-day period. There are several different variants running wild already and the latest variant, Conficker.C, is being studied by security researchers to determine what might happen next.
Discovering the Real Threats
“I kept telling everyone to worry about being secure, not about Conficker. Some people listen, some don’t. So what happened over about the past 24 hours?” asked Randy Abrams, ESET’s director of technical education. “By about 2 p.m. GMT on April 1, of the top 20 threats encountered by our users in the past 24 hours, four out of five of them were not Conficker.”
Specifically, about 16.17 percent of the threats were online-game password stealing threats. Another 21.5 percent were threats that were not Conficker and were trying to use Autorun to infect computers. Nearly 10 percent of the threats were something called Win32/Agent, which tries to steal data from a computer.
“Eighty percent of the risk was not Conficker, but 99 percent of the attention was on Conficker,” Abrams said. “Does that make sense to you? Can you imagine crossing the street and ignoring…
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