 |
|
|
Fortunately, the activation of the Conficker.c worm on April 1 did not have catastrophic effects as many feared. The midnight between March 31 and April 1 passed without incident amide growing fears that many businesses, utilities and who knows what else might just shut down or malfunction when the malware worm is turned on.
However, security experts and internet users aren’t feeling safe yet. They are still behind barricades despite zero reports of major problems due to the Conficker.c worm. Nevertheless, Internet users who had their operating system patched or their antivirus database updated shouldn’t worry about it.
"As long as you've patched or at least brought your antivirus software up to speed, you should be fine," said Chris Pirillo, a tech expert for CNN.com. Mr. Pirillo added that, unlike viruses, worms such as Conficker.c are much harder to stop because, once they are unleashed into networks, they self propagate.
The Conficker.c worm has been designed to create a link from infected host computers with command-and-control servers at midnight GMT on April 1. In order to reach the servers, the worm generates a list of 50,000 domain names from which it selects 500 domain names and contacts them.
This is already happening, experts said, and it’s happening in a quite large pool. There are several estimations of the number of PCs infected, but the most encountered number is above 10 million. Wow! It certainly is one of the largest botnets that ever occurred.
Fortunately, although the infected computers started reaching out to the command servers, nothing extraordinary happened. Let’s hope it will stay that way.
© 2007 - 2009 - eFluxMedia
