What Will Conficker Bring on April 1?

[riverdeep]

Source: PC Mag

Conficker has become the boogeyman of the security industry over the last year. The latest variant of the worm, Conficker.C, is programmed to do something on April 1. But what exactly will happen? The scary thing is, no one can say for sure.

Some security experts such as Eset are urging you to back up in advance of April 1 and to make sure that your security software is working properly. Of course (and they say this too) these are things you should do in any event. But make sure that the update mechanisms for Windows and your anti-malware are actually occurring because Conficker can turn them off.

But the big news with "C" is that the code is scheduled to come alive on April 1 and start contacting the 50,000 domains and download something. What will they download? What will it make the bots do? Honestly, nobody knows. This is the great mystery.

Conficker is really sophisticated as malware goes. It's clear that its authors are smart people and perhaps that's what's got security people worried. But the only rational way to approach this is to do the things you know you need to do anyway and then not get hung up on it. Remember, there's a very good chance that on April 1 nothing much will happen.

Read more: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2343910,00.asp

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When I first heard about this, I thought it was an April Fools joke, but it's apparently very real. This has the ability to do serious damage to your computer and some are theorizing it may actually cripple the web or at least many businesses. This is more than just some kid in the basement, these people are highly sophisticated (even using the latest paper from an MIT professor to sharpen their attack) and led Microsoft to offer a quarter of a million dollar reward for offending parties. BTW, one of the ways this infects computers is through auto-run in Microsoft Window (Macs and Linux not affected by this particular attack). If you haven't done so, turn it off (the easiest way is by downloading Tweak UI from Microsoft and following this guide:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUmNuR13P4E

[babylonsister]

1. Thanks for the heads-up. And the video! nt

[eleny]

2. Thanks

[ellisD]

3. no need for Tweak UI

if you don't feel like installing extra software just to disable autorun, you can also do it through the group policy editor in Vista/XP Pro, or through the registry editor in XP Home

just follow the instructions here:

http://antivirus.about.com/od/securitytips/ht/autorun.htm

[riverdeep]

7. Well, I don't like intsalling extra software that I don't need to either,

but for many people, those instructions are quite complicated. You have to be careful and follow instructions EXACTLY when you're talking about changing your registry.

edit: spelling

[sakabatou]

4. Good thing I'm on a Mac then

[Mojorabbit]

5. Is my antivirus enough

to beat this thing? I tried to go to the microsoft site to update which should be being done automatically according to my settings but it wouldn't let me because it said my explorer was not the latest version. I use firefox. I am not very computer literate.

[riverdeep]

6. Try going through internet explorer to update.

Microsoft doesn't let you update through anything other than their web browser as far as I'm aware. It's one of the few reasons I still have Internet Explorer.As for your antivirus, if it's a major brand, it should probably be good enough, they are all aware of this. The main thing is to be cautious and not download from sites you're not sure. But stay tuned, I'm sure there will be others who will correct me-which I welcome!!

[Mojorabbit]

8. Thanks! nt