Computer Virus Time Bomb Could Go Off April 1 – Conficker Virus
March 24, 2009 by national
Filed under Incident Reports
UPDATE: Department of Homeland Security has released Worm Detection Tool
The Conficker Internet worm could strike at infected computers around the world on April 1, a security expert warned Monday.
Conficker is a sophisticated piece of malicious computer software, or malware, that installs itself on a Windows PC’s hard drive via specially written Web pages. It then conceals itself on a computer.
Graham Cluley of the British security firm Sophos confirmed that Conficker is programmed “to hunt for new instructions on April 1.”
However, he added, “This does not mean that anything is going to happen, or that the worm is actually going to do anything. Simply, it is scheduled to hunt a wider range of Web sites for instructions on that date.”
One strange thing about Conficker is that no one yet has any idea what it is programmed to do.
In February, Cluley told The Times: “It’s as if someone is assembling an army of computers around the world, but hasn’t yet decided where to point them.”
A worst-case scenario for April 1 would be for all the world’s millions of infected computers to receive simultaneous instructions to attack, or to flood the Internet with spam e-mail.
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my god! is true? but my only question is, how can we protect our computers from the said virus?
smack everyone who doesn’t regularly update their computers or who doesn’t keep their antivirus up to date (it is because of their laziness that this virus causes problems, the other 90% who keep their computers up to date won’t suffer directly, rather they will suffer the indirect effects of those machines by way of network congestion and more spam and perhaps downtime due to relying on some of those compromised computers for server tasks or webhosting). besides that, wonder why nobody has bothered to find the author of this virus when locating him is as simple as monitoring the connections each individual virus makes. its not easy, but with a government that has megacomputers at their disposal, there is simply no excuse for letting this cause any more problems