The Conficker Worm

The book I read to research this post was Worm by Mark Bowden which is an excellent book which I borrowed from the library. This book describes the mass computer infestation by the Conficker Worm as the First Digital World War. In the Ukraine which is where this worm was released it’s legal to release a worm or virus to infect the worldwide computer community as long as it doesn’t infect any computers belonging to Ukrainian citizens. This worm checked the location of the computer & checked the type of keyboard & if either was Ukrainian it moved on. America & much of the rest of the world was unprepared for an attack on this scale. At its peak it infected 8 million computers & if there was a denial of service attack it threatened to bring down the whole internet. It infected computers belonging to the British Parliament as well as French & German military computers. The people who write worms & viruses often do it to order. Someone will say something like I want to bring down 1,000 googles computers or I want to break into a certain banks computers & steal credit card information. In the case of the Conficker Worm it was spread in a program distributed by a web site called trafficconverter.biz which was in the form of a download. From there it spread rapidly from one computer to another. At that time there was a weakness in Windows connected to port 445 which was exploited. It’s thought the Chinese Secret Service were at the back of it. Nobody knows how many black hat crackers are in China but it’s thought the government sponsor a lot of them. A lot of the experts connected with dealing with the Conficker Worm were unpaid experts who studied computer security as a hobby. As a result of all this an FBI department was set up & a lot of these experts were employed by the department although a lot of them are on a consultant basis.