Information Madness

Believe me this is no joke. I know the posting timing couldn't have been perfect then this but this is true.

A worm infecting millions of computers activated itself as predicted on April 1. However fears the Conficker.c worm would cause chaos have so far proved unfounded, with no reports of major problems.

Unlike viruses, worms self propagate, spreading by networks."Once it's out there, it's very difficult to stop," Pirillo said .

Conficker.c has a feature that disables the Windows update program in the Microsoft product, keeping Windows from becoming patched, Pirillo said. It also disables the auto-update capabilities of many anti-virus software programs.

Conficker, also known as Downadup or Kido, first appeared last November. The worm is self-replicating and has attacked a vulnerability in machines using Microsoft's Windows operating system, the software that runs most computers.

Lawrence Baldwin, the chief forensics officer with mynetwatchman.com, an Internet security site based in Atlanta, said the motivations of Conficker.c designers appear to be different from the those who designed previous worms, which infected millions of computers but had little impact.

On Wednesday, the worm is expected to expand its daily call list from a set list of 250 sites to 500 Web sites chosen at random from 50,000, "so it becomes harder to continue using some of the countermeasures that have worked so far," he said.Despite the worm's potential for causing damage, its still-unknown authors have earned "a lot of respect" from the security experts, Shah said.

There had been concerns that the worm could trigger poisoned machines to access personal files, send spam, clog networks or crash sites.

Many of the infected machines are based in Asia where there have been no reports of unusual PC behaviour.