Remember the past press (and panic) about Conficker? If you didn’t see all of the headlines this spring (although it was especially hard to miss in April – the time of its supposed activation date), Conficker, also known as Downup, Downadup and Kido, is a worm that originally surfaced in the end of 2008, when it began exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows. Infected machines become part of a botnet which, theoretically, can be used for anything from propagating spam to denial of service attacks to pushing rogue anti-malware applications.

Today, Conficker remains a threat that the world is watching. Despite Microsoft’s offer of a $250,000 bounty in return for information leading to the arrest of the malware's perpetrators, and efforts to raise awareness among computer users on how to prevent infection, Conficker continues to spread and compromise machines.  Our counterparts over at BitDefender have a new whitepaper available that details the history of the Conficker worm, the damage it’s done, and predictions on how it will spread in the future – an interesting read. Get the whitepaper here to learn more.

Keep in mind, you can find quick prevention tips to mitigate your chances of infection on the Lavasoft Malware Labs blog. You can also turn to the Conficker Working Group website, set up by industry experts to help combat the threat, for a simple test to check for infection.