Media left feeling foolish after Conficker fails to strike

By Davey Winder
Wednesday, 01 April 2009 17:22

Technology

Relax, despite numerous scare mongering reports to the contrary the Conficker worm has not triggered the predicted tech apocalypse on April 1st. But does that mean the Conficker threat has diminished?


Conficker is many things, amongst them the most talked about worm of recent years and certainly a very real threat as health services and even Parliament have recently discovered.

However, what it isn't would appear to be the harbinger of April Fools' Day doom that so many mainstream newspapers and media outlets have been reporting over the last few weeks.

You cannot have failed to spot that it is 'AFD' considering the number of gags that have appeared such as how IBM has bought Linus Torvalds, ElcomSoft has released a shamen controlled password cracker and Opera has introduced facial expression controlled web browsing.

But the real funny thing is that nobody has spotted any huge amount of malicious Conficker activity, despite the Washington Post claiming that it had stopped Big Ben in London and put an Alaskan nuclear missile installation on a full scale military alert. Haha, April Fool.

With more than 15 million infected computers so far, Conficker is no joke, that's for sure. The discovery of an April 1st date in the worm code would appear to be nothing more than a trigger to morph that code once more to make it harder to detect.

The BBC reckons that there are no reports of "unusual PC behaviour" emerging from Asia where a great many of the 15 million Conficker infected machines are located.

The Conficker payload is still a mystery, as is the date when that payload is likely to be triggered. Could it be that the bad guys will have the last laugh and trigger it tomorrow, on April 2nd?

A McAfee spokesperson told us that "McAfee researchers are monitoring for any signs of a Conficker outbreak" while warning that users should not assume a false sense of security: "Security is not a joke. In 2008, McAfee saw the largest number of malware - over 2 million malicious programs which equals nearly 5,500 pieces of malware per day."

Given the investment in the development and distribution of Conficker the only thing that you can be sure of is that a payload will drop at some point in the future, and when it does we will not be laughing.