Besides that, there are plenty of rumours about a possible Conficker attack on 1st April. I know you may think it’s all hype or scaremongering, and it might well be. But, if you run a large corporate network I’m sure you don’t want to sit down and wait until 1st April to find out.

If that’s the case, you have to know that the Honeynet Project has been working on a way to detect Conficker-infected machines and that they have just released a scanner for this task. The scanner is available as a python script and as a windows .exe executable, and can be used to scan a single host or a whole network range.

When run it on my mac the output looked like this:

# ./scs.py 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.254

———————————-
Simple Conficker Scanner
———————————-
scans selected network ranges for
conficker infections
———————————-
Felix Leder, Tillmann Werner 2009
{leder, werner}@cs.uni-bonn.de
———————————-

No resp.: 192.168.1.1:445/tcp.
No resp.: 192.168.1.82:445/tcp.
No resp.: 192.168.1.80:445/tcp.
No resp.: 192.168.1.81:445/tcp.
No resp.: 192.168.1.95:445/tcp.
192.168.1.99 seems to be clean.
192.168.1.101 seems to be clean.
192.168.1.85 seems to be clean.
192.168.1.97 seems to be clean.
192.168.1.106 seems to be clean.

Alternatively, popular scanners like nmap, Nessus and others have quickly updated their plugins to support Conficker detection. At the moment, Nmap 4.85beta5 has all the scripts included, and it’s now ready for download at http://nmap.org/download.html. If you’re are running a Unix-like system you probably want to update nmap from svn:

$ svn co –username=guest –password=” svn://svn.insecure.org/nmap
$ cd nmap
$ ./configure && make
$ sudo make install

Then run nmap using the new NSE script:

$ nmap –script=smb-check-vulns –script-args=safe=1 -p445 -d <target>

As of Nessus, use plugin #36036 to detect any variant of Conficker.

The Honeynet Project has also released Snort signatures to detect Conficker.A and Conficker.B traffic. Make sure you update your IDS sensors with these signatures and be ready to monitor your console over the next few days. If you don’t have any IDS technology in place (I will resist the temptation to ask you why by now) but you have access to a network span port, you can still plug any Unix-like box in and run ngrep like this:

$ sudo ngrep -qd eth0 -W single -s 900 -X
<insert shellcode string from here>
‘tcp port 445 and dst net <local network range>‘

Further details about Conficker fingerprint and the detection methods and tools can be found here: http://iv.cs.uni-bonn.de/wg/cs/applications/containing-conficker

Good luck.