Sure, I know the date but this isn’t some hysterical April Fools joke.
Today is zero day for a virus that is sweeping the Internet called Conficker. Conficker is believed to have infected up to 5 million computers to date.
There had been concerns that the worm could trigger poisoned machines at midnight of the day starting April 1st in order to access personal files, send spam, clog networks or crash sites.
At the time of this going to press though, many of the infected machines are based in Asia where there has been no reports of unusual PC behaviour.
Below is a helpful bit of info from CNN about tell-tale signs if your machine is infected. Also, more coverage can be found here on the BBC News site.
As ever the usual advice stands, make sure you keep AntiVirus, Windows, and security software up-to-date, and this will help make sure that the malicious software does not infect your PC.
Professionally speaking, it wouldn’t surprise me if today (April 1st 2009) passes by with nothing happening. Then and only then would the virus activate itself to start anything news worthy. I also think that the joke is that nothing will happen today, but a lot of hype about it. Then and only then will the rollout of (possible!) chaos start.
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