Despite being nearly a decade old, and years past its peak, DOWNAD, also known as CONFICKER, has not gone away. 9 years to the month after its first discovery, we take a look at the numbers to see where DOWNAD is today, and why it is still one of the world’s most prevalent malware.
Read MoreIn the first half of the year, the spam volume increased by 60% compared to the data last 1H 2013. We can attribute these to several factors: the prevalence of DOWNAD and the steady boom of malware-related emails with spam-sending capabilities (such as MYTOB). Prevalent threats like UPATRE and ZeuS/ZBOT also employed spam as its…
Read MoreFive years ago, Conficker/DOWNAD was first seen and quickly became notorious due to how quickly it spread and how much damage it caused. Remarkably, after all that time, it’s still alive. It can still pose a serious problem, as it can propagate to other systems on the same network as an infected machine – a factor that…
Read MoreDays after the April 1st activation date of Conficker, nothing interesting was seen so far in our Downad/Conficker monitoring system except the continuous checking of dates and times via Internet sites, checking of updates via HTTP, and the increasing P2P communications from the Conficker peer nodes. Well that was until last night when we saw…
Read MoreMuch has been said about the DOWNAD worm (a.k.a. Conficker) and its enigmatic payload that will supposedly be unleashed on April 1st. There are two days to go until the moment of truth and the hype isn’t expected to die down. But online threat history tells us that trigger/activation dates of equally hyped malware have…
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