The Enemy Within
Some nice weekend reading:
Various labs assigned names to the worm. It was dubbed “Downadup” and “Kido,” but the name that stuck was “Conficker,” which it was given after it tried to contact a fake security Web site, trafficconverter.biz. Microsoft security programmers shuffled the letters and came up with Conficker, which stuck partly because ficker is German slang for “motherfucker,” and the worm was certainly that. At the same time that Conficker was spewing into honeypots, it was quietly slipping into personal computers worldwide—an estimated 500,000 in the first month.
Why? What was its purpose? What was it telling all those computers to do?