Insecurities

I wonder when people will stop blaming the OS vendors and start taking security of their machines seriously…

Conficker and the Curious Yellow

I was not planning on writing another post so soon, but Utopiah here has referred a very nice article in his comments to my previous post. If you have not already read Brandon Wiley’s Curious Yellow: The First Coordinated Worm Design, I urge you to read it through.

It hits right on spot about fast distribution through a peer-to-peer network. I used the concept to hypothesize a patch propagation (described as an anti-worm by him).

The paper describes a scenario comparable to a powerful chess game turning the yellow worm to blue and backwards. Probably in recognition of this idea, Conficker uses latest encryption , very likely making a first field implementation of the MD6 algo and its fixes too!. It appears that the Conficker writer is very well versed with this paper and current technology

Besides the points made by Wiley on that page, there is one more ‘common goal’ such a network can target, and I am sure its already stated somewhere: These compromised systems can be pooled to brute force encryption security.