Old viruses take note of Conficker's successes

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Despite Conficker’s relative no-shown on April 1st, its impact hasn’t gone unnoticed in the virus creators community. An updated version of Neeris – which dates from 2005 – is now doing the rounds exploiting the same flaw as last week’s media darling.

Security experts don’t think that the creators are related, just that Neeris has undergone a redesign after seeing Conficker’s success. As ever, if you’re fully patched up with the latest versions of Windows, then you’re probably safe. The quickest way to check, though, is visit an anti-virus site. Most viruses will stop you doing that.

(via eWeek)

Tech Digest Podcast #2

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Here’s the second podcast from the team at Tech Digest. This week, we got stuck in to Twitter being bought by Google, Conficker’s no-show, and whether or not it’s reasonable for networks to get upset about Skype on the iPhone.

In the middle section, Dan extolled the joys of the Kaleidescape home cinema system, while I tried to convince him to use a couple of services that boost your Twitter experience – Mr Tweet and Topify.

Lastly, we talked about about the death of some poor guy while using Wii fit, and the end of Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia. I miss mindmaze so terribly 🙁

A small round of applause to the venerable Andy Merret, a.k.a. the Tech Trumpet, for coming up with some jingles for the start and end of the podcast. They’re rather good, aren’t they? Thanks Andy!

Download the podcast directly here, or subscribe via this URL.

As ever, if you have any comments, topics that you’d like us to talk about, or general abuse, throw it our way by sending us a tweet at @techdigest or emailing [email protected].

Top ten things we wish the Conficker worm would do (but it won't)

On April 1st, the infamous Conficker worm will unveil the full extent of its power. The virus, which has squirrelled away inside something like 15 million PCs, will ‘activate’ by receiving instructions from a mysterious central server.

It could spam, begin DDOS attacks, or just access all your files for identity theft purposes. But those are boring. Let’s have a look at what else it could do. Click through to the full post to begin.