The Conficker worm appears to be waking up. If you recall, Conficker was supposed to wreak havoc on us all beginning on April 1^st. Well, April 1 came and went with no activity from CW to speak of and the rumor was that maybe this was a complex April Fools joke. Well, now it appears that Conficker is coming to life.

So what exactly is a worm? A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program that generally will use a network to send copies of itself to other computers.

On April 9th, a new variant of the Conficker Worm made its presence known at the University of Utah. The worm infected 700 computers, although according to a spokesperson for the University, no patient records were affected. The University did have to cut off internet access for approximately 6 hours on April 10th to contain the worm.

The new Conficker variant updates earlier infections via its peer to peer (P2P) network and is reported to infect your computer with the hopes of accomplishing the following 3 objectives: inject malware to steal passwords, scan and infect other computers and last but not least, hold your computer hostage by requiring you to pay $49.95 to remove a detected threat. The worm will continue to infect you and others whether you pay the $49.95 or not.

How can I get infected? Infection can happen in a variety of methods, with two examples being connected to a network that has infected computers, or by just visiting your favorite Web site.

Go to www.cert.org and search on Conficker for some simple tests to determine if you have been infected. If you are, then pay a visit to any of the virus protection firms such as AVG, Norton, or Symantec as they can supply you with a removal program. If you are not yet infected, then make sure you visit Microsoft to download and apply the patch.

Ever wonder how much good that could be created if the folks that invented Conficker had decided to work on something that helped us instead of creating a malicious worm? The good news is that the fix is out there and we can avoid being infected.