Conficker, say it with me now, “Con-Fick-er”. I don’t even need to link to anything. All you have to do is read any website about information security this week and you can read something about Conficker. Its been covered to death, but like a flesh eating Zombie, it keeps coming back for more. It got ALL the press today (as I write this on April 1, 2009). I woke up this morning and started watching the news, they were talking about Conficker. I got to work (I work from home, so this means I walked downstairs to my office) and my bosses laptop crashed. Everyone joked that it was Conficker. I then proceeded to write a blog posting about Conficker and the cool ways it can be detected. Twitter was buzzing with talk of Conficker, what will it do? Has anyone seen anything? If it wasn’t a blog post centered around an April fool’s joke (okay, some were really funny, like the ASS certification), it was a post about Conficker. Why does a virus/worm get so much press? I’ve struggled to come up with a good reason. It defies logic in my opinion. Lets pretend that I become frustrated with being a jedi whitehat and make the switch to the dark side because I was confused and thought my powers could be used by evil to do good. The first thing I would want to do in order to take over the universe would be to create a botnet, which means I need a worm. I want my botnet to be large and powerful, which means it needs lots of compromised systems. The LAST thing I want is the code I use to achieve supremacy over the universe to be talked about on every major news outlet, blog, twitter, web site, and analyzed by researchers across the globe. So what gives? It certainly could not be the author’s intention to gain popularity. We can speculate all day and night about why we made a big deal about this, but in the end I have to wonder, what else went on this week (and especially today) that we all missed because we were to busy Confickering?
Paul Asadoorian