April Fool about Conflicker Worm
Written by Pavan Kumar on April 2, 2009
Well, the April Fools Day was very good for me as I was not fooled by even a single person on this planet. But let me make it a point, many of my readers and importantly visitors are been fooled by me. Also they are getting fooled even at this time. As you know many of the websites have fooled visitors in different ways, here I followed one way to fool you out and it clicked. I am sure, most of you are now aware what I am speaking about, yes the conflicker worm post.
This was such a kind that people got fooled but everyone refused to post a comment after getting fooled 😛 . Yes, they are right, who can brand themselves as fool after being told that he is fooled. If you are reading till this sentence, I guess you too are being fooled by me – if not read ahead.
Conflicker or Conficker?
If you have followed any highly trusted news and antivirus websites, you know, its conficker virus and not conflicker. But I targeted the readers who looked for conflicker (notice the L in the word) virus. To be frank, conflicker was among the hot search terms in Google trends and I concentrated that. Yes, I concentrated users who are already fooled with misspelling. Nothing great of me in fooling fools 😉 People came to read my junk.
I created a post with more than 600 words to make it look entirely genuine. Of course, the information and alerts I gave are genuine, and they are all trusted information just except the file association through registry tweak. If you have had carried out that, you would have lost the Windows installation. And I was sure you will not try it unless you are an expert, and experts know the effect of that 😛 . Throughout the post I made you to believe that Microsoft is upgrading your XP / Vista to Windows 7 so that it can release security updates easily and secure your system. Moving towards the end of post, people believe that the post is genuine where I have given few Microsoft links for you to download few critical updates. Both are hyperlinked to a file on my server but the anchor text used was a link on MS website. This is the old trick used by phishing people. If you are a serious internet user, you might have noticed the link in your browser, if you are newbie, you won’t.
What the Conflicker Worm fix contained?
There were two downloads, one was a registry fix. It was just a dummy registry file and updating that on your system will not make any effect on your system. The second was an exe file sized in kbs so people could easily download it. And you want to know what it did? Nothing, just it displayed the following window. Thanks to my engineering final year project work which helped me to learn basics of Visual Basic.
What you can do now?
What else, just accept you have been fooled, or if you noticed that and did not download it, post a self appraisal comment (Most of you do this even if you are fooled 😀 ). Anyway, sorry for my arrogant style in this post. You can hide yourself that you have not been fooled, I don’t have any logs, I don’t even have the track of how many people downloaded it. But I was really happy to see some hate comments on my post. The words were so worse that akismet filtered them off, and also I did not approve those which have not been filtered. These are the first hate comments on my blog and I really loved to see people scolding me, none of them disclosed their identity. 😛
Sham was the only guy to admit it 
Analytics say, I had 253 uniques, and 306 pageviews till now and average time 1.36 minutes on that page. So, I guess, my effort was not in vain.
Happy fools day again, and sorry for troubling with my useless app 😉
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I would say a nice prank, but a risky one too. If in case the conficker worm actually had spread and infected PCs yesterday as supposed, then ppl who does not have much knowledge abt this would surely blame you even though the exe file showed April fool.