April Ficks

Well, it's April Fool's Day here on Earth and the much dreaded quartet of Conficker virii are live and gnawing away at your Windows operating systems like a starving dog on a homeless man's leg. Or at least, they're supposed to be. By the way in case you're wondering, the name Conficker is reported to be a combination of 'configure' and the german 'fick' which means exactly what you think it does.

According to reports on CNN, the virii don't appear to be doing much damage anywhere, or if they are, no one seems to be noticing, however one member of the Conficker Cabal, a group of tech nerds dedicated to stopping the virii and tracking down it's author, some ten million computers have been infected by the insidious worm.

Conficker comes in four flavors dubbed A, B, C and amazingly, D. The virii take advantage of weak spots in the Windows OS and could possibly do one or more of the following: Reset and lockout users from account logins, disabling of Auto Updates and Error Reporting service, slowdown of domain services, LAN congestion, blocking of antivirus software and Windows update services. Guess you guys should have bought a Mac.

Now I know my readers are thinking that I'm making light of a serious situation here, but I'm not. Really. Conficker is such a terrible thing that multi-billion dollar corporate giant Microsoft has offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the Conficker author(s). Wow. That's almost a lot of money. They must really almost want that guy caught.

I'd love to sit here and discuss how interseting it is that April 1st marks both the Conficker trigger date and the start of the G-20 summit, but I really need to start chasing down those Confickerers so I can get that reward money. And just so you know Mr Gates, I'm spending most of it on Mac supplies!