For the past several months, some of the sharpest minds in the security community have teamed up to block cyber criminals from wresting control over what may be one of the largest armies of hacked computers ever built. While those efforts are ongoing and so far appear effective, all of that work could be undone thanks to the lax security of a single Web site.The scourge in question is the Conficker worm, a contagion that has infected tens of millions of Microsoft Windows machines since its birth in November. Experts figured out early on that Conficker was a two-stage threat because it tells infected systems to contact a list of 250 different domain names each day. If just one of those domains is registered by the virus writer, the thinking goes, it could be used to download an as-yet unknown secondary component to all infected systems, such as malicious software or spamming instructions.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/03/could_a_single_web_site.html
Why Web Site Security Matters to Us All
For the past several months, some of the sharpest minds in the security community have teamed up to block cyber criminals from wresting control over what may be one of the largest armies of hacked computers ever built. While those efforts are ongoing and so far appear effective, all of that work could be undone thanks to the lax security of a single Web site.