Everyone is hunting ‘Conficker’ to get Microsoft $250,000 bounty

This story is straight out of a futuristic movie. Our security in the information age is threatened by a ‘super-worm’, which has Microsoft so worried that its offering a quarter of a million dollars to anyone who gets information that leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for unleashing it.

The "Conficker" worm is now public enemy number one, thanks to Microsoft’s recession-busting award. You can imagine that a massive, wide-scale collaboration of web users is now coming together to hunt down the perpetrators. Apart from level-headed, concerned bodies like industry organizations, academics and Internet policy groups; there’s going to be an electronic mob ravaging the Internet, like bounty hunters once ravaged the Wild West!

Maybe, if this sudden, collaborative flurry of dealing with Conficker actually succeeds, then it will provide a clear path to the best way to deal with such future ‘digital pandemics’: unleash everyone by promising money!

The bounty award is understandable if Microsoft is set to lose more money the longer this problem goes on. Industry estimates suggest that Conficker, which exploits Microsoft Windows PCs, may have hit up to 10 million machines. For now, it appears Microsoft has reports on 3 million PCs worldwide being infected.

What Conficker does is use a mathematical algorithm to tell infected systems to regularly contact a list of 250 different domain names each day. If just one of those domains is registered by the virus writer, it could be used to download a secondary component to all infected systems, such as malicious software.

This is quite advanced functionality, and the fact no one knows who created Conficker, and what the malicious software could do makes it even more worrying!

So, in the absence of this knowledge, there’s a growing hysteria as commentators call it a ‘super-worm’ which could be “lethal weapon in the hands of whoever controls it.”

Conficker first surfaced in November, and the anti-virus community began studying it. Researchers were then able to begin registering the 250 domains sought daily by Conficker-infected systems to monitor the instructions Conficker is sending.

Apparently, a number of the domains in the names of the FBI and Microsoft.

So, the FBI is already investigating individuals who own some domains sought by Conficker. Another interesting twist is that it turns out that many of these domains belong to researchers and anti-virus companies that put them up to gather intelligence about the worm.

It’s now becoming a wild goose chase, and taking on 21st century science-fiction proportions. It’s painfully entertaining too. Keep an eye on the Conficker phenomena, and maybe you can make a bit of money too!

zanasser@gmail.com

Apple Macintosh celebrates 25 Years

Twenty-five years ago, in SuperBowl weekend, Apple unleashed the Macintosh, with a TV advertisement that has gone down in history as a classic. Based on the George Orwell novel 1984- a fitting choice as that was the launch year- it featured an athlete runner carrying an axe amidst a sea of zombie-like citizens watching a screen with ‘big brother’ on it giving orders. The athlete- presumably being a renegade Mac owner- throws the axe at the screen to destroy the rule of big brother- presumably IBM and compatibles; and the rest is history.

The Mac was the first personal computer to capture the imagination of the masses, to introduce the mouse and incorporate a graphical user interface, relying on images instead of text. It lived up to Apple’s mantra of “Think Different”. Starting with a small, all-in-one box with a monochrome screen, the Mac grew to dominate the graphic design and desktop publishing markets, and become the pick of the cool and trendy.

I had the pleasure of using a Mac as a teenager back in 1991, to produce the page that houses this column in The Star!

It was quite a hit at the time in Jordan, after Ideal Systems brought the Mac to town in 1987, and they did well to put an Apple Computer in hundreds of Jordanian businesses and homes.

Still, the Mac remained somewhat out of the mainstream, till bigger models launched like the Mac II, Mac Performa, Mac Quadra and then the Mac PowerPC range. It managed to grab around 15 percent of the US market. But market share dwindled as PC’s got Windows, and dropped in price eating up the Mac’s share throughout the Nineties till the Mac hit a rock bottom of around 2-3 percent of computers sold.

Then, in the new millennium, a transformation at Apple was led by Steve Jobs who went ‘i’ on everything. Starting with the iMac, then the iPod and iPhone.

Apple’s new clout propelled the iMac range to where it is today, stunningly back to a double digit share of the market, over 10 percent.

The Mac has extreme fans. They blow away their annual vacation savings to visit Macworld conferences, travel to the opening of every Apple store in their country, or shave Apple logos into their heads, have Apple tattoos. Here in the Middle East, we have many Mac fans too.

An interesting example is Emirates Mac (emiratesmac.com), run by Magnus Nystedt, which is a vibrant community that has now spawned a dedicated Arabic/English Apple products magazine called Shufflegazine. Check it out!

Happy birthday to the Mac and all it’s lovers. Stay creative and passionate!

zanasser@gmail.com

Tech customers seek lower-specs in a recession

The lay-offs continue among the world’s top IT companies, some of which have reported a slow down in growth or even a loss for the first time in their history.
It’s all going horribly wrong for the ‘brave new world’ we live in and no one really knows where it will all end.

Microsoft has announced that it will cut up to 5,000 jobs, after posting a drop in net income of 11 percent, for its second quarter to end of December. Yahoo announced that it will cut 1,000 jobs as part of a realignment of its 14,300 staff to focus on growth areas. IBM’s “restructuring” will lead to up to 13,000 redundancies worldwide, and the aim is to make the company more focused in the long-term.

Still, conflicting reports emerge eveyrday. Some seemingly good news, like a projection that 35 million ‘netbooks’ will be sold in 2009, then a piece of news reporting a 34 percent drop in the sale of graphics processors (GPUs).

A quick deduction that could be made from these two particuar pieces of news is that people want to buy cheaper notebook PCs, ones that don’t neccessarily have graphics processing power. And that’s exactly what you would expect in a recession!

Go ahead, examine the news coming out of the IT indutsry and you shall see a trend that suggest users will still want to buy products, but they want them to be lower-end, lower-spec, just about enough features to get by.

This trend will have devastating ramifications to all companies who only have a high-end or luxury offering, and do not allow customers to drop down a level or two in the product range.

Here’s more proof. The switch from regular (analog) TVs to fully digital TVs is being halted, or rather postponed, in the US. For several years now, all the TV networks have been gearing up for digital transmission that would render the good-old roof antena obsolete. And, would require households to acquire digital-transmission ready TV sets.

Considering the drop in the prices of the latest LCD TV units, which now adorn almost every home I go to- except mine- it would seem perfectly reasonable that the switch to digital can continue. Wrong. The US government has decided to relieve the average American of the burden of having to buy a $500 TV! So, high-spec technology suffers again, waiting for the world economy to improve!

So what technologies or products will be recession prrof? A couple of weeks ago we predicted that mobile phones, digital cameras, game systems and laptops would still grow in sales. The question now is which models and at which compromise to overall quality and performance. We’ll see.

zanasser@gmail.com