Tech Talk

Nobody really knows whether the April Fool’s day virus is real or just a hoax, but experts are not taking chances as they take to tracking down the virus seriously.

For them, the there’s no joke in April Fool’s Day computer worm.

With $250,000 bounty money from Microsoft, I know I will take this seriously.

Yes, the worm which is really called the Conficker Cabal or Conficker C has turned experts into bounty hunters as they banded together to track down the virus.

“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.”

The worm got it monicker April Fool’s Day virus because it is to set off on April 1, with the message implying that it has already implanted itself in millions of computers worldwide, waiting for the command from it’s master computer on the said date.

Some of the perceived damage on April 1 is the deletion of all on a person’s computer, use the the station as zombie PC, controlled by a master PC, or monitor a peson’s keyboard strokes to collect private information like password or bank account information.

The possibilites of the effect seems to be really scary. What’s more scary is that, our own computer could have been infected already by virus, seating itself comfortably in one corner of our unit, waiting to be summoned by its master on April 1.

I know, paranoia sinking in now.

Let’s just hope that it is indeed just an April Fool’s prank.