Downadup worm now infects 1 in every 16 PCs, says Panda Security

Scans show 6% of PCs already hit with worm; figure may be as high as 30%

(Computerworld) The computer worm responsible for the biggest attack in years has infected at least one out of every 16 PCs worldwide, a security company said today, and it may have managed to compromise as many as nearly one in three.

According to Panda Security, almost 6% of the Windows systems scanned with its antivirus technology were found to be infected with "Downadup," a worm that began aggressive attacks just over a week ago. Panda was one of the first security firms to sound an alarm over Downadup when it raised its security threat level on Jan. 12 as reports of attacks mounted.

Using data from antivirus scans performed by its consumer-grade security software and by a free online scanning tool that it makes available on its Web site, Panda found 111,379 PCs infected with the worm out of a pool of 2 million machines.

"I'm pretty confident in this number," said Ryan Sherstobitoff, chief corporate evangelist at Panda Security, as he cautioned it was just a snapshot. "Conficker is still infecting high volumes of machines and is a fast-propagating worm."


More: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9126482&source=NLT_PM

Ouch.
I'd hate to fight this, reports say they know it spreads through networks and what not, but none of how the worm is activated? no run value or something?

Belahzur wrote:

Ouch.
I'd hate to fight this, reports say they know it spreads through networks and what not, but none of how the worm is activated? no run value or something?

what so special about this worm that you have to fight?

Clean one machine and it's instantly infected again because it spreads through the network.

To clean all of the machine, you would have to keep the network down until ALL the machines are clean, so lets say it's a company and they have 30 machines on the network, wanna take a guess how long that would take to clean them all and how much money it would cost the company?

Ouch!

damn....

so what is the usual behaviour of this worm?

Don't know yet, that's what I said in my post. We know how it spreads, but nothing of what it does.