What do we know about the Conficker worm?

According to John Markoff, we know what the Conficker worm does and how it does it, but little else. Who made it? What purpose does or will the network of 5 million zombie computers it has “enslaved” serve? Will it be used for criminal purposes or as a weapon during military conflicts? So many questions that still remain unanswered, and the threat is still present.

When computer security experts teamed up to fight its onslaught, they managed to decode it and develop an anti-virus software. But new, more complex versions keep popping up, and sometimes even the experts’ code has been used by the authors of Conficker to improve it.

Patrick Peterson, a researcher at Cysco Systems, has been able to get a hint of what the authors may have in mind. He found out that they began distributing software that makes it look like that your computer is infected and that offers you to buy an anti-virus software (fake, obviously). So, it seems that money may again be the root of all evil.

This was in April. Since then, no new findings came to light. The group fighting against Conficker continues to do so by trying to develop ways of killing it, and we all keep waiting for something to happen.