Tech-bite

The conflicker worm which caused havoc on windows pcs in october 2008, came back janaury 2009 to strike more than 3.5 million pcs in 24 hours under a new name, the worm, dubbed conflicker, downadup, or kido, spreads via vulnerability that microsoft patched in october 2008. Once on a machine it sets up an HTTP server and resists a machine's system restore point to stop administrators from deleting it. The worm contains the usual trojan package that allowds the controller to download new files from their own server. But in an unusal twist, the malware generates 100's of seemingly random domain names to scan for updates , making it much harder to track the one used by the malware writer. The worm resurfaced earleir last month , infecting windows work stations and servers and causing a variety of problems for users, with infections skyrocketing to 8.9 million PCs by the latter half of january 2009.