April Fool's Day Remembers the Worm Conflicker

This updated guide examines April Fool's Day Remembers the Worm Conflicker and organizes the essential facts, background, and practical takeaways in clear American English.

On this day a year ago, the global security watcher closely monitored all activities of the worm Conflicker to prevent a large-scale attack on the global network. Luckily, Coflicker did not become a widespread threat or caused great damage as the security community was concerned.

In early 2009, Conflicker spread throughout the Internet to search for computers that did not have holes to attack. After infecting computers, the worm allows operators to gain access to infected computers, similar to having a sub-key to ' access ' computers.

Today, after a year since Conflicker officially broke out, according to Symantec, there are still about 6.5 million computers globally infected. The variants of the. A and. B strains of this worm continue to spread on the network even though the infection rate is much lower.

According to Symantec, the worm's. C variant, which is often transmitted through peer-to-peer sharing, disappeared late last year after infecting about 1.5 million computers at its peak. The. E variant of Conflicker released on April 8, 2009 also destroyed itself on infected computers since May 3 last year.

So far, computers infected with Conflicker have not been used for any significant cybercrime. But with 6.5 million computers infected, the risk of Conficker is like a gun loaded with bullets just waiting to break out. The danger of this worm is still ominous for individual consumers and businesses like what security has been recommending for over a year now.

Symantec believes that personal and business users still need to regularly update security and patch applications (both operating systems, applications and utilities); use a strong security solution package that allows multi-layer protection; pay attention to control the activities of the ghost computer network (botnet). If infected by Conflicker, use a reputable antivirus tool.