wxmanruss

from fox news this morning:

Computer Virus 'Time Bomb' Could Go Off April 1Tuesday , March 24, 2009


The Conficker Internet worm could strike at infected computers around the world on April 1, a security expert warned Monday.

Conficker is a sophisticated piece of malicious computer software, or malware, that installs itself on a Windows PC's hard drive via specially written Web pages. It then conceals itself on a computer.

Graham Cluley of the British security firm Sophos confirmed that Conficker is programmed "to hunt for new instructions on April 1."

However, he added, "This does not mean that anything is going to happen, or that the worm is actually going to do anything. Simply, it is scheduled to hunt a wider range of Web sites for instructions on that date."

One strange thing about Conficker is that no one yet has any idea what it is programmed to do.

In February, Cluley told The Times: "It's as if someone is assembling an army of computers around the world, but hasn't yet decided where to point them."

A worst-case scenario for April 1 would be for all the world's millions of infected computers to receive simultaneous instructions to attack, or to flood the Internet with spam e-mail.

Ed Gibson, Microsoft's chief security adviser for the U.K., was reluctant to make predictions about Conficker's behavior.

"April 1 is a classic date for anything like this to go off," he said. "But I really would hate to say that April 1 is going to be unlike any other day."

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JohnnyM

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/24/c...orm/index.html

snopes.com = friend, proving in this case its true.

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DesmoDave

ARE THEY SERIOUS!?!?

Simple to solve problem.

1 - grab one of your Windoze slut boxes and take it off the net, and plug it into a router (a good router, not some POS).

2 - infect the computer so you know it's going to go off. I'm sure that will be easy to do, plenty of examples out there. If you are a security researcher working on this you have it.

3 - fire up tcpdump and something like WireShark, set the computer to March 31st 23:59:59 and then wait for the thing to phone home.

4 - find the IPs that it plans to phone home too, and block them at major backbone providers.

Spread is thwarted and the C&C computer wont' be able to send instructions. Then get people to updated their anti-virus / anti-malware code.

Or better yet, just turn off the Windoze machines on March 31st and leave them off.

This is another Y2K non-event.

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GreyFX

If you have a good virus scanner, you are protected. I agree, another Y2k scam that is going to happen here. The hackers are seeing what kind of response they can get.

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DesmoDave

It's nearly 5:00AM April 1st in Australia. Oh no.. did all their Windoze computers just crash?

What about systems in Indonesia. it's almost 2:00AM there and everyone was yapping about all the danger in the unpatched pirated Windoze systems in Asia... hm.. I'll have to check my world monitoring results again in a couple of hours but so far none of the computers we track worldwide have done anything unusual.

You will notice me trying to act surprised.. sorry if it's not working.

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