

The inside story of the Conficker worm - vaksel
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227121.500-the-inside-story-of-the-conficker-worm.html?page=1

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CalmQuiet
A well-written story with a lot of details about the back-forth, cat-mouse
between the anti-viral and the conficker teams.

Apparently the conficker guys were clever enough to have a business model in
place to recruit other black-hats who would be ready to use the zombie
network.

Sounds like international forces are going to have to go under cover and
infiltrate some of these groups. We just got to hope they get over-confident
like the So Calif guy that was finally entrapped some years ago after he
became a source to other criminals and yakked a lot on boards.

Maybe undercover hacking work could provide some new start-up possibilities?

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tlrobinson
_"Other innovations revealed the sophistication of Conficker's creators. If
the encryption used for the previous strain was tough, that of the new version
seemed virtually bullet-proof. It was based on code little known outside
academia that had been released just three months earlier by researchers at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."_

Anyone know what this refers to?

~~~
sketerpot
Conficker uses RSA encryption with MD6 as its hash function. This isn't really
_necessary_ , but the worm authors were just having some fun by using
unnecessarily cutting-edge cryptography.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD6>

MD6 is one of the leading contenders for the competition to be named SHA-3,
the replacement to SHA-1 and SHA-256/512. More details on the contest:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-3>

