Conficker: We're All Still Here and WWIII-free

In recent months news, about the Conficker worm has come in a steady stream and in the last few weeks people really began to worry about what might happen on the first of April this year.

The latest estimates suggest that the Conficker virus has spread to up to 15 million machines. F-Secure said last week that so far, Conficker has been polling 250 different domain names every day to download and run an update program. On April 1st, the latest version of Conficker is supposed to start polling 500 out of 50,000 domains a day to do the same thing. If this is true, those millions of computers should be doing something by now and they are, kind of.

We were skeptical about the Conficker virus from the beginning and while we did our best to keep our hair on about the whole affair, we couldn’t help but feel a glimmer of anticipation at the thought that something might happen. Despite being fast asleep by midnight, when the sun rose this morning, we woke up unharmed, as did our computers. According to an F-Secure post, Conficker has activated but so far, nothing has actually happened. Go figure.

“Infected computers use the local time as the trigger to start generating the list of 50,000 domains, so in places where the local time is already April 1st, these computers are now actively polling for domains.

And, until the GMT date is April 1st they are in fact polling for domains for 31st March. So far there hasn't been any updates available on those sites.

In summary: Conficker has activated. So far nothing has actually happened.”

Obviously, we’ll be keeping you posted on this one, but we’re not chewing our nails down to the nubs just yet. Yes, it’s doing something, but nothing of consequence, yet.