Come April 1st, computer users beware.  Experts are suggesting that this year’s April Fool’s Day could be the year of the most damaging computer virus attack: the Conficker C.

Hackers and malware creators favor April Fool’s as the day they release worms, viruses, spybots and other damaging programs on to the web.  Conficker C has experts racing against the clock to try to beef up security measures against this malware program.  Programmers are busy writing up a storm to try to come up with a cure for Conficker C and are attempting to find the writer before the deadline.

Conficker got its press late 2008 when it infected more than 9 million computers.  Now on its third version no one really knows what this program can do.  There are the usual stand by’s like malware pop-ups, anti virus advertisements or they could be the extra damaging kind such as wiping out your hard drive, stealing personal information, install unwanted soft ware and so on.

Conficker C has grown resistant to anti-virus and other security precautions.  It has become so damaging and complicated, it has Microsoft offering a quarter million dollar reward for the head of the writer of Conficker.

What makes Conficker  so smart, fascinating and dangerous is that it hides its tracks under thousands of URLs to communicate with HQ,  It has grown so virulent from using to just 250 addresses during its infancy to 50,000 during the day it goes active.  This number is so large tracking and disabling it would be impossible to do manually.

Computer users are advised to be extra cautious during the next couple of days as April Fool’s Day arrives.  Make sure that your computer security system has been updated and is actually working since Conficker may have disabled it.  Update Windows if you are using this operating system and your anti-malware software as well.

Tags: anti-virus, computer news, computer worm, computer worm news, conficker C, conficker c worm, IT news, malware news, microsoft windows, software news, windows, worm attack, worm news, worm to hit on Apr 1

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Technology News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.