April 1 has passed and no major cyber attacks from the Conficker worm occurred yet. However, most experts said the threat is still there. What you need to know is that you don’t need to panic. You can do something to prevent your computer from being infected and you should do it. 

 

The Conficker worm has been called the largest worldwide computer infection since the SQL Slammer which hit the Internet in 2003. This was said by the Conficker Working Group, which includes 27 major tech companies such as AOL, F-Secure, Facebook, ICANN, Kaspersky, McAffee, Microsoft, Symantec and several others. 

 

Estimations on the number of computers that have been infected are various. According to the aforementioned group, the number could be somewhere between 3 and 15 million worldwide and it would most likely grow because only 30 percent of the computers running on Windows are updated with the latest patches that would prevent them from being infected.  

 

Now that on April 1 the infected computers began using a sample of 500 out of pre-programmed 50,000 domains a day to search for upgrades, the number of infected PC’s was much easier to estimate. According to Vietnamese antivirus firm Bkis, about 1.3 million machines have the first type of Conficker and the overall number of infected computers is somewhere around 2.2 million, The Register reported. 

 

According to IBM Internet Security Systems' X-Force team, one out of every 25 Internet addresses that send potentially dangerous data over the Internet is infected with Conficker.c.