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No Ordinary Kid

Posted By Pete at 2:41 PM, January 25, 2009

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By now you're probably aware of the latest and greatest from the malware underworld. The Kido worm (officially named as Net-Worm.Win32.Kido, aka Downadup, Conficker) is spreading like wildfire. It has taken all but three months to infect over 9.5 million desktops worldwide.  I'm not going to go into detail as to what the worm does (you can read about it HERE and HERE), but rather comment briefly at how well thought out and designed this worm is. It has all the characteristics of a little worm that will go a long way.

  • Exploit the vulnerability of a widely used OS - check.
  • Gain administrative control of that OS - check (meaning the worm has total access to your system, anything you can do, it can do and then some. Those of you still using weak passwords...*cough* password123, be very afraid).
  • Multiple methods of propagation - check (be sure to check your USB flash drives).
  • Block the victim PC from contacting well known security vendor Web sites for help - check (basically stranding your PC on an isolated island).
  • Download additional payload from random, almost impossible to trace sites - check.

We've all had our computers infected at one time or another, and most of you probably have seen one or more of the aforementioned attack characteristics before. The difference is, this one has it all, and it we all need to take extra precautions or our PCs will just become another statistic. The days of simple viruses and worms performing a single malicious task are long gone. Welcome to the age of sophisticated, highly intelligent attacks.

Posted by: Pete at 2:41 PM
Categories: Malware , Viruses , Worms

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