Conficker Unlikely To Trigger Doomsday on April 1
April Fool’s Day is just around the corner. Will malware make a fool of millions of computer users, or is the release date of the next version of the menacing Conficker worm just a red herring? And if so, what is really in store for computer security this spring?
“It’s quite possible that Conficker will not do anything significant on April 1,” said Graham Cluley, a senior security consultant at Sophos. “The truth is that Conficker is not set to activate a specific payload on that date. Rather, on April 1 Conficker will begin to attempt to contact the 50,000-a-day potential call-home Web servers from which it may receive updates.”
Indeed, Cluley said it’s just as likely that Conficker will do something on March 28, or April 2, or April 14 as it will on April 1. He called the emphasis by some media outlets on April 1 “really unfortunate.”
A Y2K Repeat?
From reading the news coverage, one might think a Y2K-esque doomsday is coming shortly as the computer-security world awaits the Conficker release. The Sun newspaper in London said, “Millions of computers around the world could go into meltdown on April 1 because of a deadly virus. The Windows worm called Conficker could give a hacker unrestricted access to every infected machine on the planet.”
Meanwhile, Canada’s The Globe and Mail reported, “Deep within the World Wide Web, there is an undercurrent of potential chaos building — a malicious piece of code that has already prompted the French military to ground some fighter planes.”
Like Sophos, security firm F-Secure is also making it clear that it’s unlikely anything major will happen on April 1. F-Secure noted there is always widespread media hype when a worm has a date trigger.
“There is not going to be a ‘global virus attack,’” F-Secure said. “The machines that…
Related posts: