IBM Conficker may have infected 4 percent of PCs

Friday, April 3, 2009

Although the unleashing of the Conficker.C variant on April 1 seemed to have had little impact on network security, IBM said yesterday it has found the worm on 4 percent of the IP addresses it scanned, meaning the worm is much more widespread than originally thought.

IBM's Internet Security Systems division said Thursday it scanned two million PCs to track the spreads of the worm, which began spreading in October 2007 and is now in its third generation, Networkworld.com reports. Once the worm infects a machine, it can spread very quickly to other computers.

Holly Stewart, a threat response manager with IBM, said the number of infections found in results of the survey came as a surprise.

"It is higher than what we expected," Stewart said, according to Networkworld.com. "I thought we'd see 1 percent to 2 percent [infected]."

Experts had estimated Conficker infections in the two million to four million range, but if IBM's survey is representative of all users, a 4 percent infection rate worldwide would mean tens of millions of PCs are infected.

Stewart told the news provider that might not be the case. "It's not a perfect number, nothing is," she said. "But it's the best that we can give with the data we have right now."

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