After 12 Years, Malware’s puzzling Nuisance Worm Conficker Refuses To Die

After 12 Years, Malware’s puzzling Nuisance Worm Conficker Refuses To Die

Years after it first spread, nobody knows for sure what Conficker was for


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What ranks as history’s most successful malware? Depending on who you ask, the names that come up are usually destructive spectaculars such as NotPetya and WannaCry from 2017 or perhaps the panic-inducing SQL Slammer work from 14 years earlier.


It all depends what you mean by successful, of course, but my choice would be Conficker (aka downadup), a sophisticated 2008 Windows worm that threatened mayhem before disappearing not long after before anyone could fathom its true purpose.


After an initial surge where it co-opted from 10 to 15 million PCs, experts have tracked its slow declining path to an obscurity it still looks some way off reaching.


That’s the thing about Conficker. Quickly abandoned by its unknown makers, it has stuck around. It’s not unusual for old malware for to linger but the scale of Conficker’s initial success allied to its wormlike design have sealed what is turning into a remarkable longevity.


Five years later, Trend Micro reckoned it was still detected it almost two million times, among the top malware infections that year by volume. It quickly dropped to hundreds of thousands of PCs, but in 2017 it was still popping up on the detection radar 20,0000 times a month.


And there, it seems, it has stayed with anti-malware company BitDefender telling me it still registers up to 150,000 Conficker detections per month, predominantly in Brazil, India, Thailand, and the Philippines.

Whether this is a small number depends on your perspective. Being a worm, Conficker spreads robotically from one vulnerable Windows computer to another, via USB or network shares, until there are no vulnerable systems left to target.


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