The Conficker worm is still active and is infecting 50,000 PCs a day warned a security researcher, who also said it continues to plague computers in many Fortune 1,000 companies.
The worm is infecting about 50,000 new PCs each day, according to researchers at Symantec, who reported Wednesday that the United States, Brazil and India have been hit the hardest. "Much of the media hype seems to have died down around Conficker/Downadup, but it is still out there spreading far and wide," Symantec said in a blog post.
Conficker began spreading late last year, taking advantage of a recently patched flaw in Microsoft's Windows operating system to infect entire networks and also using removable storage devices to hop from PC to PC. Security experts say it has now infected millions of computers worldwide, which now comprise the world's biggest botnet network.
"We can see that companies that spend literally millions of dollars on equipment and gear to prevent infections ... these Fortune companies have had this infection and it's stayed in their networks for a long period of time," said Rick Wesson, CEO of Support Intelligence and a member of the Conficker Working Group. "It's really hard and really expensive, and if the Fortune companies can't stop it, how can you expect small businesses to do it?"
The Working Group has set up so-called sinkhole servers that can communicate with infected machines. It has spotted infections within many Fortune 1,000 companies, Wesson said. "Everybody got hit," he said. "Even Microsoft still has infections."
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