There's been a lot of talk about how Conficker is going to create havoc on April 1. Conficker, formally named W32/Conficker.worm, began infecting systems at the end of 2008 by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows. Since then McAfee has seen two more variants of this worm and many binaries – files ready to load into memory and execute – that carry the worm’s malicious payload. Conficker.C is the latest variant. Its “call-home protocol” will change on Wednesday, April 1, and may entail an update with some as-yet unknown functionality.

McAfee already offers protection from the Conficker worm in its endpoint and network products, and Microsoft has issued a security patch for the vulnerability that the Conficker family has used to propagate. Yet many computer users continue to worry about infection.