Bkis - Conficker Infected PCs Down to 3.5 Million

According to security research company Bkis in Vietnam, the total number of PCs infected with the Conficker virus represents a declining trend as it has come down to 3.5 Million.

Bkis also estimates that the number of systems infected with Conficker-C is 1.3 Million. While the highest number of such contaminated systems can be found in China, accounting for 13.68% of total infected PCs, Brazil and Russia are second and third respectively with 10.44% and 9.29%. Moreover, there are a total of 2.2 Million computers that are infected with either Conficker A or B.

Statistics gathered at the beginning of 2009 suggest that a good 9 Million PCs had received the infection. According to Patrik Runald, Chief Security Advisor at F-Secure, the worm's creators were able to have it produce a host of websites from April 1, 2009 so that its own updates could be downloaded, as reported by SCMagazine on April 3, 2009.

However, Runald said that the Conficker Working Group, a team of security investigators working to foil the virus, managed to prevent its authors from registering domains used by the worm. The security advisor said that it was the first time that such a worldwide cooperation among the industry players had been seen and F-Secure took pride in being part of the coalition. Moreover, the people pushing the Conficker would have been stupid to do anything when everyone was anticipating them to do something on the D-Day, said Runald.

Meanwhile, security specialists said that some governments didn't do enough to avoid the perilous worm. Thus, the House of Parliament and the Ministry of Defense computers were infected with the worm. Similarly, the malware infected the French Navy's computer network, and as it affected the flight-plan data of the Marine National, the Wing's fighter jets were prevented from flying.

The reports state that Microsoft issued a security update for Conficker last October (2008). However, majority of users didn't deploy the update; consequently, the worm has become such a huge problem today.

Besides, users of pirated Windows software who turn off the automatic updates and therefore wouldn't use the Microsoft patch are typically vulnerable to Conficker.

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