Beware of the Conficker C worm coming out on April 1st!

In an event that hits the computer world only once every few years, security experts are racing against time to mitigate the impact of a bit of malware which is set to wreak havoc on a hard-coded date. As is often the case, that date is April 1.
Malware creators love to target April Fool's Day with their wares, and the latest worm, called Conficker C, could be one of the most damaging attacks we've seen in years.
Conficker first bubbled up in late 2008 and began making headlines in January as known infections topped 9 million computers. Now in its third variant, Conficker C, the worm has grown incredibly complicated, powerful, and virulent... though no one is quite sure exactly what it will do when D-Day arrives.
Thanks in part to a quarter-million-dollar bounty on the head of the writer of the worm, offered by Microsoft, security researchers are aggressively digging into the worm's code as they attempt to engineer a cure or find the writer before the deadline. What's known so far is that on April 1, all infected computers will come under the control of a master machine located somewhere across the web, at which point anything's possible. Will the zombie machines become denial of service attack pawns, steal personal information, wipe hard drives, or simply manifest more traditional malware pop-ups and extortion-like come-ons designed to sell you phony security software? No one knows.
Conficker is clever in the way it hides its tracks because it uses an enormous number of URLs to communicate with HQ. The first version of Conficker used just 250 addresses each day -- which security researchers and ICANN simply bought and/or disabled -- but Conficker C will up the ante to 50,000 addresses a day when it goes active, a number which simply can't be tracked and disabled by hand.
At this point, you should be extra vigilant about protecting your PC: Patch Windows completely through Windows Update and update your anti-malware software as well. Make sure your antivirus software is actually running too, as Conficker may have disabled it.
Microsoft also offers a free online safety scan here, which should be able to detect all Conficker versions.

From Yahoo.com Tue Mar 24, 2009 6:21PM EDT

What is a virus?

Yeah, I had to start somewhere. The definition of a virus is an illegal piece of code that can replicate itself. They often do damage, but they don't have to in order to be a virus. While I'm here, I'll explain trojan horses, worms, spyware, and adware (just naming the basics as of right now).


Trojan horse- A seemingly useful program that, when executed, wreaks havoc in your system. Say you saw a really nice game that you would like to download. It looks awesome, with all the most cutting edge 2-D cruddy graphics, complete with a chatroom. You download it, and execute it. As you're playing the game, a part of the game sneaks out and plants itself into your computer, planting registry keys as well. You get off the game, unaware of anything but what was said in that chatroom, and the computer is left alone. The "evil" part of the game sends out a message to the infected files, signaling to destroy them. Suddenly, you get a message onscreen.


It reads...









You hastily click NO. A reply from Mr.Virus comes up.


It reads...








Suddenly, you see a black screen. A little popup comes up. It says "LOL, we got you. Oh yeah, we looked in your cookies and found your credit card number. We'll use it to buy a plasma screen!"

(That was a scenario by me, so your probably not going to get these messages. But Trojan Horses are that dangerous. Be cautious of the stuf you download, and stuff that decides to dowload to your computer without your consent.)



Worm- A file that can replicate itself, mainly to take up a lot of space on a disk or network, and can eventually crash a the target. Here is a real example:

The Melissa: FAround March 26, 1999, a computer programmer wanted to crash the internet mailing system. He created an email with a list of passwords to 80 adult rated sites, also creating a macro within the email. The macro went and found the first 50 people in the recievers mailing list, and mailed itself to them. These emails repeated this process over and over again. After the Melissa worms duplicated 10 times, there would be already 97,656,250,000,000,000 copies of this email. Obviously, this puts a lot of stress on a mailing server, killing it. What's even more dangerous, is that the Melissa has four "evil twins". The Melissa.U, Melissa.V, Melissa.W and Melissa.AO are designed to mass mail themself also, but also stripping archives of their properties, and corrupting system files. Also, some of these displays the message "Hint: Get Norton 2000 not McAfee 4.02". (personally, I don't use either.)



Spyware and Adware are responsible for slowing the system down, and popups. Also, they can hijack your browser and take you to any site they please. They just run in the background, stealing your information as you type it out on a registration form, or advertising something you don't want. To make a long story short, they are annoying.

That's the basics of malicious software.

Welcome to the Virus blog. This is my first blog, so I'm going to have to get used to updating something frequently. Here, I will simply post what I know about viruses, worms, and other evil things that do damage to your computer. I'll also TRY to keep a list of popular websites that contain viruses, along with programs that can wreak havoc. If you're asking why I'm doing this, it's simply because I'm bored, or the fact that I'm just being kind by telling people how to keep their computer nice and clean. I think the reason is a bit of both. It's nice to know you can sleep well at night when you don't have to worry about your computer crashing.








Yeah...





So with that, this Virus blog has started.

If you have a virus related problem or question, email me at jiffy999@gmail.com. I will add your solved problem to the blog, hopefully.

My email is jiffy999@gmail.com

(Yes, I had peanut butter on my mind when making my email address.)