There was a panic recently that a virus known as the Conficker virus was set to activate on April 1, 2009. Well today is April 2 and it looks like nothing happened.
Part of the problem that caused the panic is the fact that no one knows what the Conficker virus is going to do. You see, when most viruses are discovered they have instructions encoded into them that tell the virus what to do. The Conficker virus is not accompanied by instructions. It instead dynamically references thousands of websites looking for instructions. This means that the master(s) of this virus can upload instructions to any one of these thousands of sites and the virus will find the instructions and obey orders. If given the appropriate orders that virus could start stealing credit card numbers off of your computer or take over your computer and turn it into a spamming machine.
Now that I have probably terrified you with worst case scenarios, I’m going to tell you that you should not get all worked up over this threat. Here are some reasons why.
- Most computers infected by this virus are in Asia and Europe. Security professionals predict that only about 6% of computers in the United States are infected.
- The virus is only known to infect Windows computers. You are safe if you have a Mac or Linux/Unix machine.
- You should be safe as long as you have anti virus software and keep it updated. AVG is a simple yet powerful antivirus solution that we recommend. They have a free version for noncommercial use, as well as affordable paid versions for commercial use. You can get AVG Anti virus by visiting avg.com.
- Download windows updates and security patches. Microsoft regularly creates and releases security patches as necessary to deal with virus threats.
If you want to be sure that you don’t have the virus you can download the W32 Downadup Removal Tool from Symantec and it can scan and remove the virus from your computer if it is present.
