A pair of security researchers from the Honeynet Project have scored a major breakthrough, finding a way to remotely and anonymously fingerprint the malware on infected networks. Now, with the help of Dan Kaminsky and Rich Mogull, off-the-shelf network scanning vendors, including the freely available nmap, have the ability to quickly detect Conficker infections. Conficker malware is programmed to generate thousands of domain names a day and, on April 1st, infected machines will start calling home to the authors for further instructions.
Source: https://threatpost.com/honeynet-project-finds-way-fingerprint-conficker-infections-033009/72453/