Experts: New PC Virus No Reason to Panic
Tuesday, January 27. 2009
A new computer virus is spreading across the Internet, but security experts say that it hasn't resulted in much damage and that its impact is primarily psychological.
The virus, called Conficker or Downadup, first appeared in November but has recently become more prevalent, infecting millions of machines by some estimates.
Technically it's a worm, a kind of malicious software that automatically spreads itself from computer to computer. The cyber-security community is up in arms because worms haven't been an issue for years.
Over the course of the decade, computer hackers shifted their techniques away from rapidly spreading worms — people will remember worms like "Blaster" and "Melissa" that shut down entire offices for a day or two — towards targeted snippets of code that are harder to detect.
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