Downadup/Conficker to possibly deliver global payload on 01 April 2009
In late 2008 Downadup/Conficker started to spread – it primarily exploited a MS vulnerability prevalent in every Windows OS since Windows 2000. Through a few more variants and after a few more months, the infections are said to be on 10-15 million machines currently. We have not seen a globally widespread infection like this for a few years – and the most concerning factor is that no one knows exactly what Downadup/Conficker is going to do, no one knows what the payload will be.
Once a day, Downadup/Conficker may contact one of 50,000 URLs to download files starting on April 1, 2009. Not only could this mean a huge DDOS attack on the Internet, but the instructions that will subsequently be pulled down to infected machines are unknown. We can only prepare for the worst and hope that this is only a practical joke.