Conficker uses RSA encryption with MD6 as its hash function. This isn't really necessary, but the worm authors were just having some fun by using unnecessarily

Conficker uses RSA encryption with MD6 as its hash function. This isn't really necessary, but the worm authors were just having some fun by using unnecessarily cutting-edge cryptography. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD6 MD6 is one of the leading contenders for the competition to be named SHA-3, the replacement to SHA-1 and SHA-256/512. More details on the contest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-3