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Beware of April Foolâ€™s computer virus

28 March 2009 10:23 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Traditionally April 1, or April Foolâ€™s Day, is a favorite day for Internet virus makers to do their mischief. IT experts say it is a good time to be extra cautious when opening e-mails.
Reports claim a new computer worm is designed to check your computer’s clock regularly, and on April 1 it attacks, modifying your operating system software, preventing computer access to certain processing functions and files, and locking out options that would allow you to remove it. What’s worse, it may already be on your computer, standing by until April 1 as preprogrammed.
The worm is known as Conficker.C and Conficker.B++. Discovered in early January 2009, the program as a sophisticated piece of malicious computer software, or malware, installs itself on a Windows PC’s hard drive via specially written Web pages.
On April Fool’s Day, the program will launch itself, burying copies of itself in up to five Windows-related system folders (all under different names), creating access control entries in your computers to lock files, and registering "dummy services" in your computer that slow your system down. It also makes changes to your computer’s operating system that turn off security notifications and processes, prevent restarting the computer in Safe Mode, delete system restore points, disable error-reporting and security services -- in effect, making sure you can’t remove the worm from your system.
If you are lucky, your computer has not been infected yet.
It is a good idea to make sure your virus protection is up to date and most importantly - backup your data.
Avoid opening emails that claims it came from an "official" or "government" authority, bank, credit union or financial institution or that instill the sense that something bad will happen unless an email is acted upon, opened or a link clicked immediately.
Some experts recommend the users not to use their computers on April 1 in order to render the malware harmless.