Since November of last year much speculation has postulated regarding the purpose of the Conficker virus infection. It was theorized to be a large scale infection that would wreak havoc on a global scale. Last month conficker’s true cause was identified and executed; to use the botnet it had created to send out massive amounts of spam email (link). Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab asserts that any given conficker-infected computer could be sending out as much at 80,000 emails in any given 24 hour period (link). Although this is a lot, it’s much less than was initially expected.
As an analyst here at LashBack I can tell you that we see a lot of commercial email everyday, and one of the things we check for while analyzing messages is whether or not the email has been sent through an open relay, which is a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. The use of botnets such as the conficker zombie-computer army is a common workaround for underhanded mailers.
Plenty of actions can be taken to remove this self-updating menace, and hopefully thanks to the publicity it has recieved it can be stopped altogether before inundating inboxes worldwide with unsolicited email.
