Can anyone out there think of a good reason why people sit around and write software programs for viruses and worms unless they are profiteering in it in some way? Do you possibly think it could just be that they have an addiction for causing harm like our local blogger and they just do it for sport? I don’t think so.
More than likely it is about free enterprise—anti-virus companies with their own string of wormy employees writing these programs or just plain criminals trying to steal our passwords and our cash. Norton says they don’t know the purpose of this worm yet but when the Conflickr worm finds a vulnerable computer, “it turns off the automatic backup service, deletes previous restore points, disables many security services, blocks access to a number of security web sites and opens infected machines to receive additional programs from the malware’s creator. The worm then tries to spread itself to other computers on the same network.”
Naturally my anti-virus program has no phone number listed to find out if I will be protected today. And that’s another gripe of mine—companies nowadays make it very difficult to call them about anything—probably because they have outsourced what ever is left of their customer service to India.
Usually these notices are hoaxes but 1 in 4 Americans have been infected according to 60 Minutes and the worm is waiting quietly until today, April Fool’s Day, for further instructions. This is NOT an April Fools joke.
