No, it didn’t show up on April Fool’s Day, it squirmed out 7 days later. Computer experts have confirmed that the Conficker worm is, indeed, for real and has started to make good its promise on late April 8. The virus variants are said to be ‘mutating’ inside millions of PCs across the globe, approximately three million units at the minimum. It has begun to infect machines by delivering a mysterious and encrypted set of data to infected PCs. Authorities have yet to uncover what the mystery software contains.

Conficker ‘C’ variant also known as ‘Downadup,’ expected to have been active on April 1, finally disclosed itself via a peer-to-peer transfer file, according to Trend Micro authorities. Symantec, on the other hand, noticed that that the new Conficker activity is linked to another notorious and widely available virus called Waledac that retrieves confidential data, turns the PC into a spam machine, and renders the PC vulnerable to being controlled remotely by the virus creators.

Trend Research has also confirmed that the Conficker/Downad P2P communications is now active. The payload on the data package that arrives in an infected machine is heavily encrypted but company security experts suspect it to be a Windows-burying ‘rootkit’ that can steal saleable data such as bank website login details.

Via BBC