On Monday, temporary servers set up by the FBI to direct Internet traffic normally, even for infected computers, were shut down. But security specialists said most Internet users and providers have had time to work around or fix the problem. Google for example should have shown you a banner. Because the virus controlled so much Internet traffic, authorities obtained a court order to allow the FBI to operate replacement servers until July 9.
The FBI, as well as Facebook, Google, Internet service providers and security firms have been scrambling to warn users about the problem and direct them to fixes.
FBI spokeswoman Jenny Shearer said the temporary servers were indeed halted and that the agency had no reports of outages. Experts said that if a computer is infected, they could still access the Internet by reconfiguring the way they access the domain name system. Instead of entering an address such as ebay. Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the Financial Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way.
If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. Hours later, mainstream publications across the world had cobbled together stories with alarming headlines foreshadowing disaster. But the doomsday calls are premature and dangerous.
They highlight a concerning pattern of reporting that has existed since the earliest days of the pandemic. Coronavirus variants are constantly being produced in the bodies of infected individuals due to mutations in the genetic code. Most of these mutations are not beneficial and do not get passed on to the next generation of virus particles.
This is expected. Occasionally, however, a mutation in the genetic code of the coronavirus gives it a survival advantage. It becomes the dominant form of the virus in one person and, if they pass it on, goes on to infect many others. This is what happened with delta, somewhere in India, earlier this year. Delta's constellation of mutations allowed it to evade the immune system a little better and move from person to person much faster.
Good for a virus, bad for us. The World Health Organization classifies emerging strains that may pose a problem as "variants of interest" or "variants of concern. The South African research team is trying to evaluate whether C. Like many other researchers across the world, they've been monitoring new cases of COVID, analyzing the genetic code of each virus that infects patients and trying to find any patterns or unusual mutants.
This monitoring is crucial to detect changes in new strains. When it comes to C. But it's very, very early days for research into this strain, and no functional studies have been performed in the lab to show C. It makes sense to publish these preliminary results because the strain is notable for its unusually high mutation rate and does contain a variety of changes to its genetic code that have been detected in previous variants, including alpha, beta and gamma.
However, alone, these changes aren't enough to say it's "worse than delta. The science of understanding the significance of a new variant is slow -- much slower than an endlessly updating Twitter feed. The team will continue to track the emergence of C. Getting scientific studies out as quickly as possible during the pandemic has been incredibly beneficial. Being able to quickly share new results and collaborate with other scientists across the world can advance understanding of the virus at a pace that matches how quickly it spreads.
Geneticists, like Balloux, are able to monitor new lineages of the virus because of how quickly they spread. And preprints are critical here, too -- they allow research to be shared almost instantaneously without having to go through peer review, which can take weeks to months. Scientists can upload their manuscripts to websites online and have their results instantly scrutinized by their peers.
Sometimes, other scientists will find flaws in the work and come to different conclusions. This is the scientific process in action. It seems to block users from going to major Web sites that provide anti-virus protection. And -- maddeningly -- it contains instructions for infected computers to contact a control system, somewhere out there in cyberspace, on April 1. Will it affect your personal computer at home? Kaminsky said probably not. Instead, security experts suspect it will go after corporate networks, especially if they run older versions of Windows.
Computers that run on Apple's operating systems, or on the free system Linux, are apparently not affected. Merrick Furst, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, said he has heard estimates that 3 to 5 percent of the computers at Fortune companies contain botnet infections like Conficker, though computer scientists concede that it is hard to agree upon real numbers.
It's been estimated that Conficker has reached anywhere from 3 to 15 million computers worldwide, though they mostly run older versions of Windows. And ICANN, the international organization that hands out addresses on the World Wide Web, has gotten a dozen universities and computer-security organizations together to stamp out the bug.
In , he said, worms took down entire networks. But in , we won't see that, he said. Computer scientists said most people probably won't notice anything wrong with their machines, even on April 1, if indeed some command is sent by Conficker on that day.
But for safety, Microsoft and other companies are working on a Web site as a go-to place for people who find their anti-virus software has been disabled by the worm.
In the meantime, Microsoft has created a software "patch" that people can find HERE if it was not installed in their computers already.
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