It’s not clear how many machines were infected, but approximately the figures range from 9 million to 15 million.
While earlier variations of the Conficker worm prevented infected machines from accessing the servers of most antivirus companies, this new variant also blocks access to sites that offer tools for removing the worm like BitDefenders bdtools.net. This version of the worm includes an instruction that tells the worm to remove itself on May 3, but , it will keep a port open on these machines that will allow the hackers to get back into these computers at any time.
According to Symantec, Conficker downloads a variant of the well-known Waledac malware, which is one of the world's most active spambots. There are some speculations around here that Conficker was created by the same group of hackers that created Waledac.
Kaspersky Labs stated that Waledac will download a rogue antivirus application along with email-worm onto infected machines. The fake antivirus software will ask users to pay $49.95 for "Spyware Protect 2009," which, of course, is anything but an antispyware product.
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