http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/technology/27compute.html

August 27, 2009

Cyberwar

<<The program, known as Conficker, uses flaws in Windows software to
co-opt machines and link them into a virtual computer that can be
commanded remotely by its authors.

With more than five million of
these zombies now under its control — government, business and home
computers in more than 200 countries — this shadowy computer has power
that dwarfs that of the world’s largest data centers.>>
Defying Experts, Rogue Computer Code Still Lurks

By JOHN MARKOFF
It is still out there.

Like a ghost ship, a rogue software program that glided onto the
Internet last November has confounded the efforts of top security
experts to eradicate the program and trace its origins and purpose,
exposing serious weaknesses in the world’s digital infrastructure.

The program, known as Conficker, uses flaws in Windows software to co-
opt machines and link them into a virtual computer that can be
commanded remotely by its authors. With more than five million of
these zombies now under its control — government, business and home
computers in more than 200 countries — this shadowy computer has power
that dwarfs that of the world’s largest data centers.

Alarmed by the program’s quick spread after its debut in November,
computer security experts from industry, academia and government
joined forces in a highly unusual collaboration. They decoded the
program and developed antivirus software that erased it from millions
of the computers. But Conficker’s persistence and sophistication has
squelched the belief of many experts that such global computer
infections are a thing of the past.

“It’s using the best current practices and state of the art to
communicate and to protect itself,” Rodney Joffe, director of
theConficker Working Group, said of the malicious program. “We have
not found the trick to take control back from the malware in any way.”

Researchers speculate that the computer could be employed to generate
vast amounts of spam; it could steal information like passwords and
logins by capturing keystrokes on infected computers; it could deliver
fake antivirus warnings to trick naïve users into believing their
computers are infected and persuading them to pay by credit card to
have the infection removed.

There is also a different possibility that concerns the researchers:
That the program was not designed by a criminal gang, but instead by
an intelligence agency or the military of some country to monitor or
disable an enemy’s computers. Networks of infected computers, or
botnets, were used widely as weapons in conflicts in Estonia in 2007
and in Georgia last year, and in more recent attacks against South
Korean and United States government agencies. Recent attacks that
temporarily crippled Twitter and Facebook were believed to have had
political overtones.

Yet for the most part Conficker has done little more than to extend
its reach to more and more computers. Though there had been
speculation that the computer might be activated to do something
malicious on April 1, the date passed without incident, and some
security experts wonder if the program has been abandoned.

The experts have only tiny clues about the location of the program’s
authors. The first version included software that stopped the program
if it infected a machine with a Ukrainian language keyboard. There may
have been two initial infections — in Buenos Aires and in Kiev.

Wherever the authors are, the experts say, they are clearly
professionals using the most advanced technology available. The
program is protected by internal defense mechanisms that make it hard
to erase, and even kills or hides from programs designed to look for
botnets.

A member of the security team said that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation had suspects, but was moving slowly because it needed to
build a relationship with “noncorrupt” law enforcement agencies in the
countries where the suspects are located.

An F.B.I. spokesman in Washington declined to comment, saying that the
Conficker investigation was an open case.

The first infections, last Nov. 20, set off an intense battle between
the hidden authors and the volunteer group that formed to counter
them. The group, which first called itself the “Conficker Cabal,”
changed its name when Microsoft, Symantec and several other companies
objected to the unprofessional connotation.

Eventually, university researchers and law enforcement officials
joined forces with computer experts at more than two dozen Internet,
software and computer security firms.

The group won some battles, but lost others. The Conficker authors
kept distributing new, more intricate versions of the program, at one
point using code that had been devised in academia only months before.
At another point, a single technical slip by the working group allowed
the program’s authors to convert a huge number of the infected
machines to an advanced peer-to-peer communications scheme that the
industry group has not been able to defeat. Where before all the
infected computers would have to phone home to a single source for
instructions, the authors could now use any infected computer to
instruct all the others.

In early April, Patrick Peterson, a research fellow at Cisco Systems
in San Jose, Calif., gained some intelligence about the authors’
interests. He studies nasty computer programs by keeping a set of
quarantined computers that capture and observe them — his “digital zoo.”

He discovered that the Conficker authors had begun distributing
software that tricks Internet users into buying fake antivirus
software with their credit cards. “We turned off the lights in the zoo
one day and came back the next day,” Mr. Peterson said, noting that in
the “cage” reserved for Conficker, the infection had been joined by a
program distributing an antivirus software scam.

It was the most recent sign of life from the program, and its silence
has set off a debate among computer security experts. Some researchers
think Conficker is an empty shell, or that the authors of the program
were scared away in the spring. Others argue that they are simply
biding their time.

If the misbegotten computer were reactivated, it would not have the
problem-solving ability of supercomputers used to design nuclear
weapons or simulate climate change.
But because it has commandeered so
many machines, it could draw on an amount of computing power greater
than that from any single computing facility run by governments or
Google.
It is a dark reflection of the “cloud computing” sweeping the
commercial Internet, in which data is stored on the Internet rather
than on a personal computer.

The industry group continues to try to find ways to kill Conficker,
meeting as recently as Tuesday. Mr. Joffe said he, for one, was not
prepared to declare victory. But he said that the group’s work proved
that government and private industry could cooperate to counter
cyberthreats.

“Even if we lose against Conficker,” he said, “there are things we’ve
learned that will benefit us in the future.”