Garrett Saundry
So today is April 1st, which means a bevy of April Fools gags. This year we saw the Gmail Autopilot and the discontinuation of the Blackberry Storm and upside down Youtube to name a few. If you have been listening to the Internets lately, there’s also something big that’s supposed to be going on, and that’s the Conficker worm.
If you’ve been keeping up to date with this story, you’ll have seen that as of right now, it’s been sort of a nonissue. Now this doesn’t mean that it’s not out there and going to deploy at some magic hour that’s been predetermined. This worm is definitely still a threat. It’s been estimated that it has already infected between 9 and 15 million Windows based machines. It has infected everybody from casual at home users to the UK Ministry of Defense.
The problem with this worm is that nobody knows for sure just what exactly it’s going to do. Conficker is supposed to be getting a set of new instructions on April 1st which is why there are a lot of jumpy IT professionals today. Just because there hasn’t been much activity doesn’t mean that there isn’t going to be any in the future. The code of the virus basically tells it to listen for updates at any time past April 1.
If you think you may have been infected, there are many resources out there that will help you determine if you’ve been infected. If you’re running Windows, you should already have gotten an automatic security patch for it and it goes without saying that if you’re clicking around the internet with abandon, you should be investing in a good anti-virus program.
I think we need to wait and see what this worm does in the near future before counting it entirely down and out, the potential is definately there even if things have been relatively quiet on the Conficker front so far.