Has Conficker Been Abandoned By Its Authors? 174
darthcamaro writes "Remember Conficker? April first doom and gloom and all? Well apparently after infecting over five million IP addresses, it's now an autonomous botnet working on its own without any master command and control. Speaking at the Black Hat/Defcon Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at security firm F-Secure, was told not to talk in detail about the Conficker gang — the problem is that not all researchers were under the same gag order. Just ask Roel Schouwenberg, senior anti-virus researcher at security firm Kaspersky, who says 'The Conficker botnet is autonomous; that is very strange in itself that they made Conficker replicate by itself. Now it seems like the authors have abandoned the project, but because it is autonomous, it can do whatever it wants and it keeps on trying to find new hosts to infect.'"
Translated: (Score:5, Insightful)
We have no idea who is behind this or what they intend to do so we will continue with wild-ass speculation in order to keep our companies in the news.
How is this 'autonomy' any different... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:so where are they now? (Score:1, Insightful)
6. The inventors are waiting until there are >>5 million hosts up at the same time in their P2P botnet. Then they inject the new instructions.
This is a real worry. It may be military. (Score:5, Insightful)
When enough users have been lulled into inaction and enough machines have been taken over, the enemy will strike. Meanwhile, the operators may be sending commands to specific PCs of interest. Security researchers might not be picking up commands targeted to only a few machines.
Most anti-virus defense efforts assume the enemy is only marginally competent and has no strategic goal. It's clear from what's known about the Conflicker attack that the enemy is significantly more competent and better funded than those behind previous viruses. The Conflicker attack was updated frequently until it was deploying itself successfully despite defensive efforts. Once the attack continued to grow despite defensive efforts, the updates stopped. That's not loss of interest, that's operational art.
This thing behaves like it has military tactical planning behind it.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not as impossible and funny as it might appear. Imagine a HD crash and no backup of the keys to issue new commands. :)
But it could just as well be kept dormant 'til it's out of the news... if Sasser taught us anything, it's that self replicating aggressive worms WILL survive and continue to pose a threat, even years after the last version has been found by every AV tool.
Re:Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
So you have this conspiracy theory, and even though you have no proof you'll happily spread and act on it until someone provides proof that it's wrong?
Ever wonder where FUD actually comes from, folks?
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like the order came not from F-Secure corporate, but from a Three Letter Agency of some sort (Probably the FBI, but perhaps one of the FBI's counterparts in another country.)
It may not be that he was strictly ORDERED to keep quiet, but requested to do so and is honoring that request out of courtesy for the investigators.
Re:This is a real worry. It may be military. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, most AV researchers do take their "enemies" serious. Malware writers are competent. If only because they manage to use security holes which require quite a bit of intimate knowledge of the machines (and the OS) you try to infect.
It's not a secret that most malware writers do have a goal by now: Money. The days of the pimple-faced kiddy sitting in the basement and, out of frustration of not getting laid, releasing some worm on the world. That's so 90s.
What's right is that AV research usually targets the "mass market", at least when it comes to AV development. If you're working for strategic targets, you usually can't make a big speech out of it, neither military nor government nor financial services like you blabbing about how insecure their setup is. So any commands issued only to a small subset of the botnet would probably go unnoticed.
While we're pissing in the wind anyway, allow me to add mine: How about this whole deal being a targeted attack, and they just waited for their designated target becoming infected.
Re:Translated: (Score:5, Insightful)
We have no idea who is behind this or what they intend to do so we will continue with wild-ass speculation in order to keep our companies in the news.
Which may be exactly what the virus was designed to do: infect as many people as possible in detectable ways, and keep the industry going!
Re:This is a real worry. It may be military. (Score:2, Insightful)
Have there been any new worm enabling Windows vulnerabilities disclosed since Conficker was first noticed? Looking around a little, there have been more non-worm remote exploits than I care to sort through; the worm/non-worm distinction I am drawing is that a worm enabling vulnerability doesn't require any action on the client.
The quiet period could simply be a result of nothing new to add.
Re:so where are they now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Translated: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Always possible they lost control of it instead (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea with conficker was that it would generate thousands of websites and contact them for payload instructions. The security community registered a lot of these sites in advance, so it may be the case that these things are always trying to phone home but no one is answering.
I also imagine that ISPs are blocking connections to servers they have identified as conficker controllers.
My understanding is that theres some p2p aspect too, but it may not be operational. Heck, getting legitimate p2p working on a residential connection is a pain, let alone a known illegitimate one. Again, Im guessing most ISPs are blocking this somehow.
So the botnet may be up and running, but it cannot contact its masters. Eventually these PCs will be replaced or reimaged and conficker will be a statistical blimp a year from now.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Watch the series again. S.A.C. has nothing to do with a virus becoming self aware. It's actually a collective of individuals who believe to be acting autonomously but, in reality, are all following a pattern mimicking individual intent by a single entity.
The Laughing Man was originally a single hacker, but once he stopped his activities, a group of others took it from there and their actions collectively created another Laughing Man.
It's basically digital gestalt-ism combined with neural networking where each human is a node in the larger network without being aware of the whole.
Sort of like 4chan, but much less horrible ;)
Re:How is this 'autonomy' any different... (Score:2, Insightful)
> thousands of people have tried to take this beast over in the past few years
Which groups of timelines are you from? For most of us, Conficker is not even one Earth year old.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
that actually makes a hell of a lot more sense than someone just saying "I'm bored, let's do something else" and giving a 5 million computer botnet up. I mean come on, what are they, insane?! That's like the computer criminal version of buying a buying an italian sports car and then driving it into a lake on purpose. You just don't do that once you finally have one. This article is just stupid beyond words! There is no way in hell it was just "given up." The person behind it either died or is feeling some serious heat from people trying to catch them.
This shows an immense failure of imagination. Just off the top of my head, maybe the developed something better. Maybe they've found something more profitable to do. If you spend more than two seconds, I'm sure you too can think of other alternatives. And you're apparently calling it "insane" and/or "immensely stupid" to not fall for the sunk costs fallacy. It doesn't matter how much time or effort they sunk into it making it. If the continued costs of running that car are too much, if you aren't a victim of the sunk costs fallacy, you abandon it, regardless of how much you went through to get it to begin with. Here the analogy breaks down, since you can probably sell the car for at least some payback with little risk, whereas selling your botnet is a very risky activity, even if it's potentially quite lucrative. If that Italian sports car was stolen and you probably can't sell it without getting caught, then yeah, driving it into the lake may be the best thing you can do when you no longer have a need or desire for it. (This is also a bad analogy in that what the botnet creator is alleged to have done here isn't drive it into a lake, but merely to walk away. The equivalent of driving it into the lake would be to dismantle the botnet, rather than just leave it out there...)