Computer Worm Attacks on Wednesday?
Don’t think this virus is an April fool’s joke. The Conficker computer worm is set to go off on Wednesday – and could mean an unpleasant surprise for PC users all over the world.
Patrick Ronald is chief security adviser of F-secure, a computer security software company. He says: “The Conficker is a worm that has been around now for about four months. On April 1st it has a trigger that it will start communicating with up to fifty thousands different websites to download an update to itself. So it is not an April’s fool’s joke.”
It remains unclear what harm Conficker will do, but Ronald says most viruses are about stealing money. Either by getting hold of people’s credit cards or by stealing online user names and passwords. So what preventive actions can we take?
“You have to have an up to date security product for sure, and what I mean by that is an anti-virus or firewall and make sure it is up to date and actually working. If you want to go ahead and scan your PC, there are several free tools that will scan your PC for this particular worm, but make sure you do this before April 1st”, Ronald says.
Experts say the virus could take advantage of more than 15 million computers worldwide.
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