DHS Studying Global Response to Conficker Botnet

Robert McMillan writes on ComputerWorld:

One year after the Conficker botnet was front-page news around the world, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is preparing a report looking at the worldwide effort to keep it in check.

The report, to be published within the month, shows how an ad hoc group of security researchers and Internet infrastructure providers banded together into an organization they called the Conficker Working Group. Its goal was to address what was at the time the world's most serious cyberthreat.

"We said, 'This was a very good example of the private sector, globally, working together to try to solve a cybersecurity attack, so let's fund the creation of a lessons-learned report to just document what worked, what didn't work,'" said Douglas Maughan, a program manager with the Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate.

The report could provide a template for future cyber-responses, security experts say.

More here.