Early this year I wrote a post about the Downandup virus, also known as Kido Conficker. It is a worm that spreads through networks with low security, storage media and computers without the latest security updates. When I wrote about it, the virus has already infected millions of PC’s and I thought it will soon end with all this.

It seems that I was wrong. More than that, the Conflicker worm, got into hundreds of medical devices in US hospitals and some other countries. The good new in this story is that patients were not harmed. The infection was detected by Marcus Sachs, director of the Internet Storm Center. It seems that the number of devices infected is around 300 and their vulnerability was related to unpatched version of Microsoft’s operating system.

There was a patched released by Microsoft in October which could solve the problem, but the device manufacturer said that there is a 90-days notice be given before the machines could be patched.
“For 90 days these infected machines could easily be used in an attack, including, for example, the leaking of patient information,” said Rodney Joffe vice president to a company created to deal with the worm. “They also could be used in an attack that affects other devices on the same networks.”
“Once they work out what they’ve got, who knows who they will sell access to,” he said. “This has to be fixed.” So the conclusion is that we should be in alert that the information might get in wrong hands? Who has this interest?