The Conficker Cabal

K sent me this article from the NYT

An extraordinary behind-the-scenes struggle is taking place between computer security groups around the world and the brazen author of a malicious software program called Conficker.

Conficker is malicious code that generates what is called a botnet - a diverse collection of corrupted computers that can receive remote instructions from their new masters.

This is not new. Botnets have been sending email spam for years.

One of the largest botnets tracked last year consisted of 1.5 million infected computers that were being used to automate the breaking of “captchas,” the squiggly letter tests that are used to force applicants for Web services to prove they are human.

The inability of the world’s best computer security technologists to gain the upper hand against anonymous but determined cybercriminals is viewed by a growing number of those involved in the fight as evidence of a fundamental security weakness in the global network.

The scope of the problem posed by Conficker is big enough to get IT professionals to band together to stop it. That they've had little success so far is a bit unsettling:

Several people who have analyzed various versions of the program said Conficker’s authors were obviously monitoring the efforts to restrict the malicious program and had repeatedly demonstrated that their skills were at the leading edge of computer technology.

For example, the Conficker worm already had been through several versions when the alliance of computer security experts seized control of 250 Internet domain names the system was planning to use to forward instructions to millions of infected computers.

Shortly thereafter, in the first week of March, the fourth known version of the program, Conficker C, expanded the number of the sites it could use to 50,000. That step made it virtually impossible to stop the Conficker authors from communicating with their botnet.

[snip]

The researchers, noting that the Conficker authors were using the most advanced computer security techniques, said the original version of the program contained a recent security feature developed by an M.I.T. computer scientist, Ron Rivest, that had been made public only weeks before. And when a revision was issued by Dr. Rivest’s group to correct a flaw, the Conficker authors revised their program to add the correction.

Read the whole thing.