So You Managed to Survive the Great Conficker Panic

If you managed to avoid the great Conficker worm explosion last week you were not alone. Although some security experts predicted the Internet would grind to a halt and that the world would practically come to an end, in the event the Conficker worm turned out to be something of a damp squib. While Conficker could have infected up to 15 million PCs worldwide, the activation date of April 1st, passed pretty uneventfully. This was the date which experts believed the virus, which was laying dormant on millions of PCs, was supposed to wake up and cause havoc to the Internet. In the event, nothing much happened, but it is believed that the virus might activate one day in the near future, so keep an eye out for suspicious activity on your PC.

Conficker started spreading last November, and there are many variants of the virus around that can spread in several different ways, including through infected USB drives. If you are worried that your PC might be infected, Microsoft have released a tool capable of removing several Conficker variants, plus several other malware infections. You can download it from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/security/malwareremove/default.mspx