According to recent reports, the Conficker C worm – a malicious program that allows a master computer to take control of “zombie” PCs – will be active again on April 1, 2009. The news has domain name registries – such as Nominet for .uk and CIRA for .ca – increasing security measures for their domain name registration process.

The original version of the virus, Conficker A, was released in late 2008 and quickly spread to over 15 million PCs. It then used 32 daily generated web addresses (out of a pool of 250 domains) as the means of communication between the master computer and the zombies and attempted to sell fake antivirus software to computer users.

While the initial infections were serious, they haven’t spawned many symptoms up to this point. However, the Conficker C worm is expected to create a much larger impact, with BBC reporting that the C variant will randomly select 500 domain servers each day from a pool of 50,000. (more…)