April 1 came and went without a peep from the Conficker worm we were warned so much about. Most of us had downloaded a Conficker removal tool or used that cute Conficker Eye Chart. And by April 2 with no news of catastrophic computer hacks we were thinking we had been punked, Y2K style.
But along comes Yahoo Tech which says Conficker infected computers are sending out spam. It's not so much of a problem in the U.S., according to the article, as "Some 3.5 million are estimated to be infected worldwide (with just 4 percent of those machines installed in North America), though estimates of infection range from much lower to substantially higher."
Reuters says this:
Conficker installs a second virus, known as Waledac, that sends out e-mail spam without knowledge of the PC's owner, along with a fake anti-spyware program, Weafer said.
The Waledac virus recruits the PCs into a second botnet that has existed for several years and specializes in distributing e-mail spam.
"This is probably one of the most sophisticated botnets on the planet. The guys behind this are very professional. They absolutely know what they are doing," said Paul Ferguson, a senior researcher with Trend Micro Inc, the world's third-largest security software maker.
He said Conficker's authors likely installed a spam engine and another malicious software program on tens of thousands of computers since April 7.
He said the worm will stop distributing the software on infected PCs on May 3 but more attacks will likely follow.
With progress comes pestilence.
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