Conficker Worm - Still thriving on unpatched systems

I was surprised to see that "A" and "B" variants for the Conficker worm are still thriving in-the-wild.  It exploits MS08-067, autorun exposures, and other vulnerabilities on unpatched systems.  While the 6 million IP addresses are not the true number of PCs infected, there are still a sizeable number that need patching.  

Conficker Still A Big Deal
http://blogs.pcmag.com/securitywatch/2009/08/conficker_still_a_big_deal.php

Conficker Working Group - Current Statistics
http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/wiki/pmwiki.php/ANY/InfectionTracking

Conficker Infection Test - Can you see all 6 images? (if yes your PC is okay)
http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html

QUOTE: The Conficker worm outbreak seems so long ago and there's been no news about it for so long, but that doesn't mean it went away.

The Conficker Working Group, a consortium of security and related companies, continues to track the massive botnet created by the outbreak. These days it runs at around 6.2 million unique IP addresses. About 80% of these appear to be Conficker A and B, The C variant was not all that successful, because the avenues for its spread had already been largely cut off.

The fact that the numbers fluctuate within a fairly narrow range means that the botnet is pretty stable, but it's hard to say exactly what's happening. The testing measures IP addresses which means that some systems (notebooks that roam from network to network) are overcounted and some (networks with NAT) are undercounted. I think it all adds up to a very stable network; the systems that got infected in the original outbreaks are, by and large, still infected.

These tables are specifically for the A+B infections.

-----------------------------------------------------
Day        Date        Total HTTP Hits  Unique IP's 
-----------------------------------------------------
Friday     2009-08-28      329,610,182    5,768,246 
Thursday   2009-08-27      369,957,038    5,882,556  
Wednesday  2009-08-26      366,973,896    5,864,465 
Tuesday    2009-08-25      328,376,902    5,675,661  
Monday     2009-08-24      280,028,571    5,726,258  
Sunday     2009-08-23      305,703,590    5,157,771   
Saturday   2009-08-22      337,360,653    5,263,328  
Friday     2009-08-21      334,046,979    5,649,833
Thursday   2009-08-20      347,347,632    5,723,993