Take A Plunge

A computer virus is spreading through the U.S., Europe and Asia infecting 9 million machines. This infection may make Microsoft Windows users vulnerable to digital hijacking.

However, according to several computer security firms it may be a dud.

His virus is spreading rapidly through the corporate networks. According to Finland-based F-Secure, this virus is spreading more rapidly than any other virus they’ve seen in years. F-Secure’s chief security adviser, Patrik Runald, said that the coding of this virus meant to pop up alerts to computer users of false infections on their computers and offer to help by selling the users antivirus software to fight the virus. But this is not happening and the effect is lesser. However the threat may be much more potential.

“The gang behind this worm haven’t used it yet,” F-Secure’s chief research officer, Nikko Hypponen said by phone. “But they could do anything they like with any of these machines at any time.”

This virus is known as the “Downadup” or “Conficker” virus. This is a new version of a bug that appeared in October.

The virus disabled the common automatic download Microsoft’s security update on infected machines.

Security analysts are puzzled over the origin of the virus. F-Secure’s best guessed it as from Ukraine because it does not infect computers there (the code was done in such a way to leave computers there).