April Fool’s Virus Quiet Thus Far

The world is holding its breath in anticipation of the April Fools virus that has been the talk of IT for weeks.  The Conficker worm is reportedly on millions of users’ computers and it was to begin its attack today. So far, nothing has gone wrong.

Experts still warn that the worm can strike any time so everyone can’t celebrate yet. Others think the publicity has scared the author of the virus. “Also known as Downadup or Kido, Conficker turns infected PCs into slaves that respond to commands sent from a remote server that effectively controls an army of slave computers,” reports Reuters. “Researchers feared that the network created by Conficker might be deployed on Wednesday for the first time since the worm surfaced last year because its code suggested it would seek to communicate with its master server on April 1.”

Executives at an anti-virus company have commented that they’ve never thought it would happen on April Fools. In fact, some believe it will be tomorrow or even next week. So what can happen if this worm does it’s attack? “The virus exploits weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. It can evade corporate firewalls by passing from an infected machine onto a USB memory stick, then onto another PC,” concludes Reuters.