Downadup = 4/1 (or: Conficker set to do something on April 1)

Conficker (also known as Downadup) is a pretty nasty worm that has three known variations (A, B, and most recently C). It gets onto your machine through a Windows security flaw that was patched in October of 2008, and is programmed to call a sequence of control servers for updates and presumably other nasty activities. Recently, Kaspersky Labs, a security software and research company, was able to figure out the list of names the worm would check for updates and teamed with OpenDNS to block these attempts. Now researchers are saying that the worm is programmed to do something on April 1. What that is, they don’t know; they only know that it is set to “call home” on that day. Fortunately, there are many ways to remove the worm if you’ve been infected. And as always, keeping your antivirus and antispyware software up-to-date and installing Windows updates will help protect your machine.