The Good Old Days of Conficker

I have been doing a lot of reading this week about Conficker and the speculation about what it will do on April 1 (the March 19 article in the New York Times and great insights by Byron Acohido in his March 24 USA Today article and on his blog http://lastwatchdog.com/  to name a few).  Predictions and assessments range from it being a cruel April Fool’s Day prank to a “dark Google” to the “botnet of botnets” to Bill Murray’s classic line in Ghostbusters: “dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”.

It is clear that we have stepped into a new world of cyber attacks from an entirely different breed of cyber criminal.  This worm continues to function and evolve in full view, resisting the efforts of a distinguished consortium of vendors who have united to stop it.  And like the science fiction creatures of the 50’s, it continues to devour things in its path like defensive software and the ability to receive Microsoft updates as it grows.  Scary stuff or, again borrowing from Ghostbusters, a “ Class Five Full Roaming Vapor… A real nasty one, too”.

All of this leads me to wonder what we will see over the next ten years.  During my time at Cybertrust I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Peter Tippett – now at Verizon Business – who is credited with being one of the first people to create antivirus software and is also credited to have helped bring down some of the higher profile attacks earlier in the decade.  I am sure to the early pioneers of AV like Peter, worms like Slammer, Blaster and Zotob were really seen as quantum leaps in malicious attacks, much as Conficker is today.  While these previously nasty worms seem like ages ago, it is good to remember that Zotob was August of 2005.

My point?  As bad as Conficker may seem, we may find ourselves looking back on it wistfully sooner than we would care to think.  It is yet another warning that the old methods of endpoint security will need to evolve and evolve quickly to keep pace, as the next and likely even nastier worm is currently percolating somewhere in cyberspace.

I can almost see it now – longing for the good old days of Conficker.