Hear of April Fool virus? Protect your computer..

[abogaida]

I was reading the news this morning in yahoo, and I read about a virus that is being released already and it will start in Wed..
The call it the Digital Pearl Harbor.
Check yahoo news out and protect your computer.

[jbking]

Are you talking about the "Conficker" worm, not a virus, that there is a CBC article dated last Friday with "digital Pearl Harbor" in the title but nothing more recent? My personal opinion is that this is going to be more like another Y2K given all the hype about it, since there aren't any details about what it will do really other than "phone home."

[Dan]

Form what i hired it is mostly all hype.

What is going on is the conficker worm is programed to check for new insturctions on April 1st as it is basicly a torgin worm. So the reason every one is worked up is no one knows what will happen exactly.

Conficker is realy only intresting in that it blocks anti-virus websites and sites that might have patches for it. This also means it is easy to tell if you have it. If you can't load this site: http://www.mcafee.com and your net connection is working you might have a problem. It also blocks alot of the ways you could use to fix the problem witch makes it a pain to remove.

Conficker only effects windows boxs, so if you are on anyhting else your safe and there is a patch for thoses on windows witch you should have if you do windows update.

For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker

[SNIPERDUDE]

Yes, my dad actually had this worm on his computer about a week ago. Didn't cause any serious harm, but was incredibly aggravating to remove. If you get it, work from safe mode to delete it.

[abogaida]

Do you know how to check for it?

[apomb]

try going to Norton or mcafee website, if you cant, you have it if you can, you dont.

[andrew.]

Good thing I use Mac OS and Linux. I'm so happy I quit Windows.

[saltpro15]

lol it's so over hyped, like everything else these days. the media makes more money if they report more interesting stories, and this is a capitalist country, it's not hard to figure out. I run Linux anyway, so I could care less about this thing

[DemonWasp]

If you patch your system, you should be fine. It's mostly corporate networks that will be hit (as their IT departments may not issue all security updates to the workstations lest this cause incompatibilities) and fools running Windows without a competent firewall / virus scanner / update procedure.

I wish I wish I could run my games on Linux - it'd be the end of Windows for me.

[Amailer]

If it can prevent people from viewing sites...could I make it so that say, paypal.com points to their phishing servers?

Some info on Microsoft
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/computer/viruses/worms/conficker.mspx

[Tony]

DemonWasp @ Tue Mar 31, 2009 5:24 pm wrote:

It's mostly corporate networks that will be hit

It's mostly unlicensed copies of Windows that don't authenticate well enough to get all the right patches. Which would be just about all of Russia (yes, including corporate), China, India, etc...

Amailer @ Tue Mar 31, 2009 5:43 pm wrote:

If it can prevent people from viewing sites...could I make it so that say, paypal.com points to their phishing servers?

Yes. Better learn to keep an eye out for TSL/SSL signatures.

[BigBear]

What do you mean by paypal.com points to their phishing servers?

[Tony]

your system never sends requests to "paypal.com", it just uses it as a key to lookup the IP address of the server (and all TCP/IP traffic goes to that IP). If I was to intercept that lookup (or simply added an entry to your hosts file), then your system will think that "paypal.com" is hosted at a different location.

That's why paypal (and online banking) actually uses TSL/SSL to securely login. You see this as HTTPS (instead of HTTP).

[Insectoid]

I want to set up a fresh windows machine and infect it just to see what happens.

I believe it will require an internet connection to work. In it's current state, it does nothing. On april 1st, it will contact a server to receive instructions to do something. I may be wrong on the details, this is just what I heard at co-op.

[Tony]

insectoid @ Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:38 pm wrote:

and infect it just to see what happens.

such research is typically performed using a VM. Although I have heard of some malware that is able to detect such, and go into an idle loop.