Will your identity be stolen on April 1st?

March 25, 12:49 PMGadgets ExaminerDan Appleman

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Conficker will attack all the machines on your
network.

Whether it’s doing taxes, online banking or shopping online, it’s a safe bet that you have personal information on your computer that could be used to steal your identity. Are you doing enough to protect that information?

For example: millions of computers are already infected with the Conficker virus, one that is set to go off on April 1st. Nobody knows what this virus is actually going to do. But they do no that it’s scheduled to call home on April fool’s day, and it may try up to 50,000 domains in the process – so it’s unlikely that network administrators will be able to block it. On that day it will receive its instructions. Will it look for personal files to download? Will it install a keyboard logger to capture your personal information? Will it recruit your PC to attack one or more other sites?

Now is a good time to make sure that your computer is fully updated and that you have antivirus software installed. By the way – if you can’t run Windows update, or if you can’t connect to an antivirus site or install antivirus software – that’s a good sign that your computer is already infected! In that case you may need expert help to clean your system.

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