Panda Security’s malware detection and analysis laboratory has said that the much-feared reactivation of the Conficker virus has yet to cause massive infections.
Says Jeremy Matthews, head of Panda’s sub-Saharan operations: “The ultimate aim of the virus is to obtain money. With the alarm generated by the media attention, security vendors have been working to avoid a potentially widespread epidemic. Evidently though, if someone is going to steal money, they are not interested in being headline news. That’s why we believe that its creator is trying to find a new zero-day vulnerability to exploit in order to spread the infection – but at a moment when our guard is down, not when everyone is on the alert.”
At 00:00h on April 1, Conficker started to generate 50,000 new URLs from which the malware would supposedly be able to update itself to a new version, starting a massive series of infections. However, until now, no new versions or additional infections have been detected other than those already associated to the previously active variants.
“It is still possible that at any moment one of these URLs could be activated and the worm could download an update to its code or new malware. In any event, this would only affect users who are unprotected against Conficker,” says Matthews.
