Week in Review: Conficker waking up?

gallery

Late-breaking news that Conficker could have finally woken up is at the top of this Week in Review.

After the ‘Great April Fools Conficker Scare’, many observers would have assumed the threat had gone, but as researchers talking to IT PRO have warned, this was always likely to happen.

Like a good horror movie scare, it appears that the people behind Conficker have possibly revealed its ‘present’ a week later, for the holiday weekend.

By the time of writing, we don’t know what it is Conficker has actually downloaded from particular servers.

However, even if this is another joke being played, we've seen this week that other computer worms have already copied its functionality, not to mention the new mobile phone and social network worm threats.

Also this week, an EU directive officially came into force in the UK, which means ISPs must keep data on customers for one year.

With a cost of £48 million, the government said that this legislation is necessary to protect both public and national safety, but it has some fierce critics.

Funny what cutting a cable can do. Tens of thousands of people in East London were left without broadband after a contractor damaged BT cables.

It was also all stations go for the National ID card scheme, with CSC and IBM handed contracts to roll out biometric and passport systems worth more than half a billion pounds.

The contracts will bring biometric technology to the masses a step closer. As well as ID cards we’ll be expecting passports featuring a chip with fingerprints and digital photographs from 2011.

This week, we also collected opinions from journalists across Dennis Publishing titles to create a list of the technology companies that we like and admire.

As well as the usual suspects like Google, Apple and Twitter, there are a couple of surprises like GoodOldGames and Red Hat that could interest you.

Thanks for reading, and Happy Easter from IT PRO!

Email to a friend

Print this page