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The Conficker worm is scheduled to activate on April 1, and the unanswered question is: Will it prove to be the world’s biggest April Fool’s joke or is it the Information Age equivalent of Herman Kahn’s legendary 1962 treatise about nuclear war, “Thinking About the Unthinkable”?
Conficker is a program that is spread by exploiting several weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Various versions of the software have spread widely around the globe since October, mostly outside the United States because there are more unpatched, pirated Windows computers overseas. (The program does not infect Macintosh or Linux-based computers.)
An estimated 12 million or more machines have been infected. However, many have also been disinfected, so a precise census is difficult to obtain.
It is possible to detect and remove Conficker using commercial anti-virus tools offered by many companies. However, the most recent version of the program has a dramatically improved capacity to remove commercial anti-virus software and to turn off Microsoft’s security update service. It can also block communications with Web services provided by security companies to update their products. It even systematically opens holes in firewalls in an effort to improve its communication with other infected computers.
Conficker is a program that is spread by exploiting several weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Various versions of the software have spread widely around the globe since October, mostly outside the United States because there are more unpatched, pirated Windows computers overseas. (The program does not infect Macintosh or Linux-based computers.)
An estimated 12 million or more machines have been infected. However, many have also been disinfected, so a precise census is difficult to obtain.
It is possible to detect and remove Conficker using commercial anti-virus tools offered by many companies. However, the most recent version of the program has a dramatically improved capacity to remove commercial anti-virus software and to turn off Microsoft’s security update service. It can also block communications with Web services provided by security companies to update their products. It even systematically opens holes in firewalls in an effort to improve its communication with other infected computers.
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