Update of Doom

Trey Brown
3:20pm
4/10/09

Once again it seems the Conflicker virus has given the world a cause for worry. It was noticed on April 8th that the Conflicker virus has been sending out secret and almost undetectable updates to the computers it has infected around the world. According to current estimates the least number of infected computers is figured to be around three million. And it has only been through the use of "honeypot" machines, used by the company Trend Micro that were deliberately allowed to be infected, that the updates were initially noticed. The decompiling (taking apart) of a variant called "Downadup" found that the infected computers were supposed to begun updating April 1st so it was mostly good luck that the updates were noticed. It is not currently known what the updates contain because of the heavy encryption present. It is speculated though that the updates are designed to bury themselves deep in Windows and ferret out sensitive information like bank login info. A connection to another infamous virus called Waledac has been found in the form of a back door left in a computers programming and that after May 3, 2009 the update/worm is supposed to remove itself but the Waledac backdoor will still be present meaning the compromised computers can still be remotely controlled.
Having a computer virus that has gotten so out of control just shows how hard it has gotten to maintain internet security. Identity theft has been an ever increasing problem and seeing how prevelent this Conflicker virus has become means people worldwide are going to be hurting once whoever is behind this begins to use the computers they have gained control of. With a virus that has become so wide spread there is a very high chance of many people having compromised computers and not even knowing it. Maybe after figuring out what the Conflicker update contains a way can be found to stop it before internet crime becomes an even bigger problem for everyone than it is now.

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