The Conficker Virus Is Set to Strike (Also, The Guardian to Be Published via Twitter Only)

Posted by Isaac Fitzgerald, AlterNet at 3:28 AM on April 1, 2009.

This is really funny:

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

The move, described as "epochal" by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter's brief text messages, known as "tweets", which are limited to 140 characters each. Boosted by the involvement of celebrity "twitterers", such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry, Twitter's profile has surged in recent months, attracting more than 5m users who send, read and reply to tweets via the web or their mobile phones.

As a Twitter-only publication, the Guardian will be able to harness the unprecedented newsgathering power of the service, demonstrated recently when a passenger on a plane that crashed outside Denver was able to send real-time updates on the story as it developed, as did those witnessing an emergency landing on New York's Hudson River. It has also radically democratised news publishing, enabling anyone with an internet connection to tell the world when they are feeling sad, or thinking about having a cup of tea.

Hooray for a little April Fool's Day humor.  Unfortunately, not everything today is going to be all jokes and games:

Last week, I pulled out my Internet cable, unplugged my USB drives, and searched my Windows machine for Conficker, the astounding computer worm that threatens to wreak global havoc once its latest version begins to phone home for further instructions on April 1. Well, maybe: While security researchers warn that the worm's creators may be planning on conducting fraud or even "information warfare" aimed at disrupting the Internet, nobody knows what terrible deed Conficker will ultimately pull off. What we do know is that Conficker is devilishly smart, terrifically contagious, and evolving. Each time experts discover a way to constrain its spread, its creators release new, more sophisticated versions that can push even further. The latest version, Conficker C, hit the Internet early in March. Estimates aren't precise, but researchers say the worm—in all its variants—has so far infected more than 10 million machines around the world.

Conficker gets into Windows through a security hole that Microsoft fixed last fall. As a result, the worm tends to run rampant on networks where IT guys have been slow to patch people's machines (like at the British Parliament, for instance, which reported a Conficker infection last week). Countries with lots of pirated versions of Windows are also vulnerable, with China, Brazil, Russia, and India among the most Confickered nations. On the other hand, I was lucky—my computer was worm-free. If your machine has been properly patched and protected, there's a good chance it's safe, too. (See Symantec's page on how to detect and remove it.)

But having a safe machine doesn't mean you're safe. Conficker's true aim may be to bring chaos to the Internet, at which point you might feel its wrath even if your computer is OK. When Conficker infects a host, it ensnares it into a botnet—a massive network of computers geared for unsavory ends. Botnets can spew out spam, mount denial-of-service attacks to bring down Web sites, or consume so much bandwidth that they drown out all other network traffic.

Much of the media coverage surrounding Conficker has centered on its go-live date, April Fool's Day. But that's something of a red herring; it's unlikely that anything will blow up on the first. The date is significant only to the latest version of Conficker, which is set to go to the Web and check a huge list of sites for files put out by the worm's creators that will instruct the botnet what to do next. But previous versions of Conficker, which are much more common than the latest variant, have been looking for those files for months now. April Fool's Day will only become Conficker Day if its creators chose that day to upload the worm's new instructions.

Read the rest of Farhad Manjoo's article here. If you're a PC user, here's what you need to do to protect yourself. If you're a Mac user, you really shouldn't be too worried about your computer's safety:

So, as a Mac user, how worried should you be about Conficker? The short answer to the question is that, unless you’re running Windows inside a virtual machine or via Boot Camp, you really don’t have much to fear from Conficker. It’s a worm that takes advantage of Windows systems with unapplied security patches—a population that may be as high as 30 percent of the Windows machines out there. Conficker won’t work on OS X at all, so most Mac users have nothing to fear from the worm.

What do you think folks, is today going to be Y2K all over again or the beginning of the death of the intertubes?

Tagged as: april 1, guardian, conficker