Confounded Confiker

I must have been asleep - or busy - but I missed the growing buzz about the April 1 (April Fool's) virus of the year - the Confiker virus - until just today! (oops).

According to a BBC report, "There have been some reports the worm could trigger poisoned machines to access personal files, send spam, clog networks or crash sites."We don't know what will happen but don't expect anything dramatic," Symantec's Vincent Weafer told the BBC."

The reason Symantec and other security software experts don't think Confiker is likely to prove dangerous is that the main purpose of the virus - which has already infected about 15M computers - is to make money. Viruses with that intent generally like to stay hidden as long as possible - collecting as much income as possible before discovered and disabled.

"The worm is self-replicating and has attacked a vulnerability in machines using Microsoft's Windows operating system, the software that runs most computers."  Microsoft issued a patch to fix the vulnerability last October. However millions of computers that are running pirated versions of Windows are unpatched. And the reason everyone is concerned is that there is reason to believe the virus will change its behavior come April 1.

How to protect yourself? The usual: firewall, anti-virus program, and Microsoft is urging people to keep up with security updates. If tomorrow your computer starts to behave abnormally, take it offline and out of any network it may be on, and check in with your virus protection software provider for removal tools.

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