Yet elegantly simple. Conficker "wants" to blind a PC's defenses, and one of its weapons involves blocking access to antivirus and security Web sites. There are a number of simple ways of doing that, such as messing with the 'hosts' file to intercept domain names and direct them to a black hole IP address; that's like DNS on a local level, and we discussed it here years ago as a way to block ad banners (I still use it).

Those images come from the sites the worm is known to block, so, if the images from the a/v and security sites (top row) don't load, very likely it's Conficker blocking access. The second row of images taunts Microsoft by coming from vendors of other operating systems, which Conficker, which targets Windows, doesn't try to block.

Informative and catty. I like it. Good find, Tom.