Despite the fact that Conficker spread so rapidly and so successfully, it never really did anything to most of the machines it infected, leaving an enduring mystery about the motives for creating and unleashing it. Some thought the attackers were trying to create a giant botnet of infected machines to distribute spam or conduct denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against websites—a later variant of Conficker was used to scare some users into downloading a rogue antivirus program. Others feared it might install a “logic bomb” on infected systems that would cause data to self-destruct at a future
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