Privacy, Security & Virus Information
Conflicker On Set to Make April Fools Of Millions
There’s one day in the year when people’s sense of humour gets severely tested and on 1st April, computer users are about to be on the wrong end of a particularly nasty joke.
It comes in the form of an odious worm called Conflicker C which has a liking for destroying anti-virus programmes and making people’s personal data vulnerable. The worm, which is detected as Win32/Conflicker.C, is geared up for a big splash on April Fool’s Day.
And Microsoft is one of those companies who don’t see the funny side, offering a £250,000 reward to catch and stop those behind it. It has described it as a ‘severe’ threat and warns that action should be taken if it’s presence is detected.
Conflicker, in all its various guises, is a piece of malware which is reckoned to have already infected over ten million personal computers using Windows operating systems worldwide.
Conflicker acts as a time bomb, waiting until a particular day before it starts its evil task of penetrating people’s computers. It has the ability to turn a single computer into a component of a super-spamming system, leaving personal data exposed. And on 1st April, when the bomb explodes, it will generate some 50,000 URLs a day and try to report back to, or download, around 500.
Conflicker’s main claim to fame is its ability to join together millions of infected computers with its software code and effectively forms one single, all-powerful computer. This is known as a botnet.
Despite their innocent sounding name, botnets are mostly behind the majority of spam emails and one of their most devious ploys, is to get people onto various websites which then plant malware onto their computer’s systems. This then acts a hose, siphoning off a user’s private data, such as name, bank and credit card details, and passwords, and then uploading into the criminal’s website. This data is then sold to other criminals which will use it to defraud people of their money.
Computer security experts reckon that the Conflicker is so dangerous because it not only has the ability to penetrate a computer’s defences, but that it is so difficult to spot when it’s in place.
But people should be on their guard warns the experts. One of the signs that a computer using Windows XP, or Windows Vista, has been breached, is that a security update may be blocked. If this happens, the alarm bells should start ringing.
Computer security experts recommend that no-one trawls the net, or sends emails, without operating an anti-virus system. They also point out that they should use a security enhanced web browser, such as Windows Explorer 7, or the latest version of Firefox.
Other safety tips include turning off the preview message facility in some email packages and not opening sites which are regarded as unsafe. Much like when people are told not to open emails whose origins they don’t know and especially not open attachments on unknown message, people are now being warned to definitely not use websites which are suspicious. Downloading anything which cannot be verified is a modern IT version of Russian roulette.
Conflicker is yet another way to attack Windows based systems and Apple Mac users are said not to be under threat.
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