Worming the Internet

Unprecedented collaboration between ICANN, antivirus vendors, other malware security professionals and domain name registrars in US, China and elsewhere is seeking to neutralize the Conficker/Downadup worm. The worm's authors evidently intended the worm to download payloads from any of a long list of domains, so the security community has been busily registering or regaining control of those domains to prevent them being abused.

Microsoft has offered $250k for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of those behind Conficker/Downadup, a sign that Internet security issues are bad for all Internet users, not least the big businesses that depend on it.

Meanwhile, a third variant of the worm has been detected with a trigger date of April 1st. This could be big.