Conficker, Schmonficker. Thumbdrive Worms and Rogue Antivirus Are Real Threats

I haven’t written very much about the Conficker virus on this page except to note that it caused France to ground their fighter jets. I didn’t write about it because, despite the hype and the dreaded April First doomsday threat that never materialized, I just haven’t been seeing it play out very much in the field. Yes, the conficker virus was apparently written by an advanced malware author or more likely, a team of authors, but the threat is largely nullified by simply patching your Windows system. If anything, the fact that the threat was never bigger is a testament to how far Microsoft has come with managing their patch delivery to their customers.

But according to McAfee, the real threat out there is not Conficker. Its people sticking their thumb drives everywhere and either getting infected or leaving an infection. As the chart above indicates, the number of infections of conficker versus thumb-drive virus “sneaker net” distribution is stark.

McAfee also notes that hackers are getting really good at gaming Google’s keyword searches to drive users to compromised hosts in order to install rogue antivirus software, which is actually malware.  This information is from their quarterly threat report.  You can read the whole report here.