Darn Conficker

April 1.  Should be a day of mirth and merriment, but for the Public School District System Admin, April Fools Day brings lots of work and worry.  Normally, I spend this day (or more accurately, the week before the day) checking systems to make sure that all Anti-Virus and system updates have been performed.  But this year, I got to add the Conficker worm to my day of worry.  I have been sitting all day, waiting to see if something would happen.  I am confident that my systems are all protected from this worm, but to be safe, I banned all USB key drives from the school today, and have been building a stand alone computer to do nothing but scan drives for problems.  And I have watched and waited.

I have been watching network traffic, looking for anything out of the ordinary.  I have been online, seeing if Net traffic was bogging down anywhere.  And I have been reading news and tech reports to see if anyone is noticing anything weird.  So far, nothing.  That, of course, does not mean that nothing will happen, or happen in the future, but for now, Conficker is appearing to be a no show, and perhaps a big April Fool on us all.  I am not convinced of the latter.  I am thinking that somehow, somewhere, this will rear its head and perform some little show, but I am afraid that it may be a show that is without volume, so as to go virtually unnoticed, and we as Internet users won’t know it happened until we try to take money out of the ATM, and find a balance of 0.

If nothing else, this episode allowed me to accomplish some tasks that I normally do not get to do during the course of my teaching day.  I did get my office/storage area cleaned up, and got some testing of other servers done.  I guess I should be thankful to Conficker for giving me that opportunity.  But I can’t.  Stupid virus writers and their dumb viruses.  I hope they choke on their keyboards!

Thanks for reading.