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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

April Fools Virus Day--Conflicker, Wait and Monitor

Computer experts are extremely wary of April 1.

No -- not because it's April Fool's Day.

But because, as CNET-TV Senior Editor Natali Del Conte explained on The Early Show Tuesday, it's when the "Conficker" computer worm is expected to reach out for new instructions from its creators -- and no one knows the nature of those instructions.

Conficker is already one of the worst computer security threats in years -- though experts agree April 1 could come and go with nothing more serious than the then-dreaded "Y2K" bug turned out to be -- over-hyped, to say the least.

Still, better to be safe than sorry.

Mac Users already are: Conficker only runs on Windows computers, in stealth mode, spying on your online activity seeking to obtain your passwords and financial information.

You should be safe, Del Conte says, if you install the most recent updates for Microsoft and run regular anti-virus scans: - CBS News Story

Well it is D-Day for the Virus, today IT People are on pins and needles monitoring Networks to see what is going to happen.

1 comment:

Dave said...

It isn't necessarily true that it will steal passwords, in all actuality it can essentially do ANYTHING it is told to, that is unless it's removed. Microsoft has a removal tool, as does trend-micro, and symantec.
It may be harmless, or it may not- no one knows as it reaches out to some of the possible 50,000 websites it generates to check for updates each day.
Most likely it will be turned into malware for the purpose of making money for the creator.