Conficker
loresecurity
The 2008 Windows worm that built one of history's largest botnets and popularized domain-generation algorithms.
Exploiting the MS08-067 vulnerability from November 2008 onward, Conficker infected millions of machines at its peak and rallied an industry-wide Conficker Working Group against it, with Microsoft posting a 250,000-dollar bounty on its authors. Its daily crop of algorithmically generated rendezvous domains forced defenders to preregister thousands of names, making the DGA a standard chapter of malware analysis. Infected relics kept phoning home for years, a monument to unpatched legacy fleets.
Also known as: Downadup, Kido