Kido/Conficker virus still lingers in RP, firm warns

MANILA, Philippines - Destruction brought about by the Kido/Conficker worm has not yet been completely eliminated, an anti-virus firm warned recently. The virus remains in the Philippines, a country which has the fourth highest number of infected cases in Southeast Asia, Kaspersky Lab said. The virus whose origin and author have not been determined have infected 126,594 computers in the Philippines. But an estimated five to six million computers have been infiltrated with the virus, Kaspersky Lab executives said during a videoconference with journalists from Southeast Asia. Globally, China leads in infected case with 2.6 million, followed by Brazil at 1 million, and then Russia at 835,000. Though the damage cost wrought by the virus has yet to be determined, Kasperksy Lab execs said the devastation it has wrought – and is still causing – has resulted in lost opportunities. The company cited a report from research firm Consumer Economics which said that the annual global financial damages from malware attacks on businesses exceeded $13 billion in 2007. A Malaysia-based Kasperky Lab official, managing director Suk Ling Gun, said that being attacked by the Kido/Conficker virus is akin to “leaving your house and suddenly a bunch of strangers got hold of your key and staged a party in your house." Kasperky Lab, which is headquartered in Moscow, said the huge “botnet" formed by computers infected by the virus provides cybercriminals with the means to conduct devastating DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks as a way to steal confidential data from both home users and corporate networks and to distribute unsolicited content such as mass spams. Oscar V. Pineda, a network engineer at iSecureNetworks Inc., Kaspersky Lab’s lone distributor in the country, said. “Oftentimes, IT administrators tend to forget or fail to update their anti-virus software in their computers. This is why companies are always the first to get hit by virus attacks," Pineda said. The Kido/Conficker worm, he said, was so pervasive that 40 percent of the attacks in the recent months were related or spawned by it. - GMANews.TV