Today, April 1 2009 is the alleged Doomsday of the Conficker/Downadup worm activation. Conficker has lately been under the spotlight of many well known tech blogs and even news websites garnering lots of attention. Even Conficker fanpages have been created in popular social networking sites. Now that it’s here disappointment might strike the masses as reportedly “Conficker has activated. So far nothing has actually happened.” Still there’s plenty of time ahead, and since not all of the worm’s behavior is known there might be a surprise ahead for us.
The people at F-Secure have uploaded a presentation about Conficker on Youtube. Follow the links below to watch it.
The Conficker botnet has stirred to life, using its peer-to-peer communication system to update itself and download scareware (fake anti-virus programs) to millions of infected Windows machines.
The Conficker update comes a week after a heavily-hyped April 1st activation date and provides the first sign of the motivation behind this malware threat — financially motivated cybercrime.
According to Associated Press, University of Utah officials say a computer worm (Conficker) has infected more than 700 campus computers, including those at the school’s three hospitals. University health sciences spokesman Chris Nelson said that patient data and medical records have not been compromised. Moreover, Nelson said that the worm is mainly attacking personal computers and could be siphoning login and password data, credit card numbers and banking information, reinforcing the beliefs that the motivations behind Conficker are financial.