Conficker Update: Using P2P to Send Files

Far from being an April Fool's joke, the apparent update of the Conficker worm on the first day of this month set the stage for Conficker to get going on some more unexplainable, if not blatantly malicious, activities this week.

Although the April 1 update didn't cause mass destruction along the lines of what was predicted during the Y2K era, the security experts are starting to understand a little bit more what the worm is up to, and what it could be capable of.

According to a blog on Trend Micro posted by people who have been tracking Conficker and all its movements, on the evening of April 7 Conficker started acting up. The virus started sharing a large document (119,296 bytes) via peer 2 peer communications from the dummy Conficker peer nodes that have been set up around the world. The TCP response (scientifically code named "blob") has been tracked as it checks for internet connectivity through the following sites: myspace.com, msn.com, ebay.com, cnn.com and aol.com.

After the blob is done doing whatever it needs to -- they don't really know what it does yet -- it deletes all traces of itself. Apparently, Trend Micro also found that the blob will stop running on May 3. This is it, May 3 could be the day the world will be shut down when Conficker paralyzes our computers ... or it could be another date for an innocuous file transfer that seemingly does nothing. Your guess is as good as ours.

Protect yourself against Conficker and other viruses with anti-virus software: check out our side-by-side comparison to find the best. For more tech news that won't give you nightmares (or viruses for that matter), check out these other blog posts:

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