In a scene out of the Wild Wild West, Microsoft has offered a $250,000 bounty for information on the controllers of the Conflicker worm. This very real danger to the World Wide Web has caused the top virus hunters in the world to form an official posse to try to catch these cyber outlaws. According to an article in the technology section of USA Today, Conflicker has infected between 1 million to 10 million pcs including the German military and the British and French airforces.
Once a pc has been infected the Conflicker worm prevents the infected pc from being cleaned up. The worm then spreads to any shared hard drives. In addition it also copies itself to any device that can be plugged into a usb port such as da igital camera. Consequently that device spreads the virus to the next device that it is plugged into. Then comes the part that sounds totally science fiction. At least once a day the infected machine tries to connect with 250 domains, each of which is a control server. "In effect the controllers can at anytime, deploy parts, or all, of a massive botnet, to do their bidding."
USA Today did not say anything about the ability of our antivirus software to protect our computers from this threat. So as Sargent Esterhouse on Hill Street Blues used to say, "Be careful out there" as you go about your business on the mean streets of the internet.
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