This Excellent and extremely comprehensive (you’ve been warned!) article is from this Month’s The Atlantic, and explains the story behind 2008′s Conficker computer Worm, the most sophisticated instance of computer malware in the history of, well… ever.

The article also explains the differences between a computer virus, a trojan, and a worm.  Beware, this article is a bit scary, as the Conficker story is actually far from over.  Chances are pretty good, if you’re reading this from a Windows XP computer, that you actually have and are running this worm, and don’t even know it!

If you feel your computer might be infected, or if it’s been a while since our last visit, contact us today to get something onto the calendar!  A Stress-Free Digital Lifestyle is hard to achieve when you’re fighting computer viruses and spyware for space on the computer, and we’re here to help out.

Enjoy!

When the Conficker computer “worm” was unleashed on the world in November 2008, cyber-security experts didn’t know what to make of it. It infiltrated millions of computers around the globe. It constantly checks in with its unknown creators. It uses an encryption code so sophisticated that only a very few people could have deployed it. For the first time ever, the cyber-security elites of the world have joined forces in a high-tech game of cops and robbers, trying to find Conficker’s creators and defeat them. The cops are failing. And now the worm lies there, waiting …

By Mark Bowden

The first surprising thing about the worm that landed in Philip Porras’s digital petri dish 18 months ago was how fast it grew.

He first spotted it on Thursday, November 20, 2008. Computer-security experts around the world who didn’t take notice of it that first day soon did. Porras is part of a loose community of high-level geeks who guard computer systems and monitor the health of the Internet by maintaining “honeypots,” unprotected computers irresistible to “malware,” or malicious software. A honeypot is either a real computer or a virtual one within a larger computer designed to snare malware. There are also “honeynets,” which are networks of honeypots. A worm is a cunningly efficient little packet of data in computer code, designed to slip inside a computer and set up shop without attracting attention, and to do what this one was so good at: replicate itself.

Most of what honeypots snare is routine, the viral annoyances that have bedeviled computer-users everywhere for the past 15 years or so, illustrating the principle that any new tool, no matter how useful to humankind, will eventually be used for harm. Viruses are responsible for such things as the spamming of your inbox with penis-enlargement come-ons or million-dollar investment opportunities in Nigeria. Some malware is designed to damage or destroy your computer, so once you get the infection, you quickly know it. More-sophisticated computer viruses, like the most successful biological viruses, and like this new worm, are designed for stealth. Only the most technically capable and vigilant computer-operators would ever notice that one had checked in.

Porras, who operates a large honeynet for SRI International in Menlo Park, California, noted the initial infection, and then an immediate reinfection. Then another and another and another. The worm, once nestled inside a computer, began automatically scanning for new computers to invade, so it spread exponentially. It exploited a flaw in Microsoft Windows, particularly Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003—some of the most common operating systems in the world—so it readily found new hosts. As the volume increased, the rate of repeat infections in Porras’s honeynet accelerated. Within hours, duplicates of the worm were crowding in so rapidly that they began to push all the other malware, the ordinary daily fare, out of the way. If the typical inflow is like a stream from a faucet, this new strain seemed shot out of a fire hose. It came from computer addresses all over the world. Soon Porras began to hear from others in his field who were seeing the same thing. Given the instant and omnidirectional nature of the Internet, no one could tell where the worm had originated. Overnight, it was everywhere. And on closer inspection, it became clear that voracity was just the first of its remarkable traits.

Various labs assigned names to the worm. It was dubbed “Downadup” and “Kido,” but the name that stuck was “Conficker,” which it was given after it tried to contact a fake security Web site, trafficconverter.biz. Microsoft security programmers shuffled the letters and came up with Conficker, which stuck partly because ficker is German slang for “motherfucker,” and the worm was certainly that. At the same time that Conficker was spewing into honeypots, it was quietly slipping into personal computers worldwide—an estimated 500,000 in the first month.

Click HERE to read the rest of the article at The Atlantic.

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