IBM ISS: Conficker.C worm affects 4 Percent of PCs

IBM has become the second company in two days to report that the number of computers that have been infected with the Conficker worm are higher than first previously thought. IBM’s Internet Security Systems (ISS) has been scanning over 2 million computers in the last 24 hours, and has reported that 4 percent of those had the worm.

PC World has reported that Conficker has been reported to be the worst worm in recent years, a threat response manager with ISS said the figures came as a surprise to them as the figures were higher than they expected. ISS thought that they would only see 1 to 2 percent of computers being infected.

IBM researchers were hard at work last week and reverse-engineered Conficker, so they could figure out a way to track the infections; they did this by measuring peer-to-peer traffic on the network. IBM’s report of the number of computers infected by the Conficker worm is much the same as OpenDNS reported. They also said that they had spotted a large number of infections.