April Fool's Day Virus

[ghost12332]

Just figured ya'll should be aware of it

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/24/conf ... pstoryview

[ad_hominem]

"We love catching bad guys," said Alvin Estevez, CEO of Enigma Software Group, which is one of many companies trying to crack Conficker. "We're like former hackers who like to catch other hackers. To us, we get almost a feather in our cap to be able to knock out that worm. We slap each other five when we're killing those infections."

Man, I could almost hear the geeky voice and the pauses while he adjusts his glasses.

[KILLA-COW]

I'm excited for April 1st now.

[Habboi]

Erm, how exactly can you catch the worm? I uh would rather not lose 6 or more years worth of files and memories.

[Dionysos]

Damn microsoft:P and yeah that is careless on their part.

I would backup everything important... what else could you do? hm maybe checkk all those things in the article.

[KILLA-COW]

whole thing is probably an april fools joke.

[dissonance]

I would backup everything important... what else could you do?

Remove the ethernet cable for a day and fire up wireshark?

[MayheM]

Yeah I am not to concerned about it.... I rebuilt my machines this past weekend so i already have all my files backed up, and the chances of them being infected are like 0%...

[Rasky_26]

So, for the people who aren't very computer-savy (*cough* me *cough*) what would you guys recommend as precautions?

[dissonance]

Run a virus check, and unplug your box on the first and tell your firewall to be on the lookout for shenanigans.

[stoopdapoop]

whole thing is probably an april fools joke.

that was my guess.

[Jman]

Bit of a douchey april fools joke making all this up as now so many people will spend hours backing stuff up and running multiple hour thorough virus scans to prevent something that doesn't exist.

[Megadude]

If it is a joke, then CNN should be shot. April Fools Day joke are called that because they happen on April Fools Day. Announcing this so early,will make people think it is real, when it could be just a big joke. Then again, it could be a hoax by some kind of hacker, so people would be unsure if it a real threat or not, so people panic about their computers while the hacker laughs to it's pathetic self.

[ghost12332]

ffs people, its not a joke. This virus is already fully active. On April 1st however, the self-evolving part of it steps itself up to variant C which will enable the bot networking part of the virus.

The Conficker worm spreads itself primarily through a buffer overflow vulnerability in the Server Service on Windows computers. The worm uses a specially crafted RPC request to execute code on the target computer.[5]
When executed on a computer, Conficker disables a number of system services such as Windows Automatic Update, Windows Security Center, Windows Defender and Windows Error Reporting.
It receives further instructions by connecting to a server. The instructions it receives may include to propagate, gather personal information and to download and install additional malware onto the victim's computer.[6] The worm also attaches itself to certain Windows processes such as svchost.exe, explorer.exe and services.exe.[7]
The worm seems to implement some of the ideas presented by Fucs, Paes de Barros e Pereira at the Blackhat Briefings Europe 2007, specifically: digitally signed additional payload, use of PRNG for communication and P2P communication.[8]Payload

The "A" variant of Conficker will create an HTTP server and open a random port between 1024 and 10000. If the remote machine is exploited successfully, the victim will connect back to the HTTP server and download a worm copy. It will also reset System Restore points, and download files to the target computer.[9]

[srredfire]

OMG I HAVE THE VIRUS AND MY COMPUTER IS ON FIRE!?