The much-feared reactivation of Conficker on April 1 goes off without a bang

The much-feared reactivation of the Conficker virus, forecast for April 1, has yet to cause massive infections.

At 00:00h on April 1, Conficker started to generate 50,000 new URLs from which, supposedly, the malware would be able to update itself to a new version, starting a massive series of infections. However, until now, no new versions or additional infections have been detected other than those already associated to the previously active variants.

Ironically, one of the main dangers associated with Conficker is not the worm itself, but the fact that cyber-crooks are exploiting the notoriety of this malware to distribute other malicious code from domains ranked highly in Internet searches for the word “Conficker’.

To avoid falling victim to Conficker and other malicious code, PandaLabs advises:

• Having an up-to-date anti-malware solution installed.
• Installing the patch that fixes the vulnerability exploited by Conficker.
• Having a solution to prevent malicious code spreading through USB devices (pen drives, MP3 players), etc.
• Not opening emails from unknown sources and never clicking links or running files attached to such emails.

A Conficker removal tool is available for download here.