Jason Miller, Shavlik's security and data team manager, claimed that Conficker.E has a kill date of May 3 and will cease to be functional from that date, although it is possible that it could be taken over by another botnet controller.
“Although the Conficker.E virus will no longer function after 3rd May, the Conficker.C virus will still remain active on affected systems,” Miller said.
Schwartzbauer said: “I do feel nothing may happen, but it is looking like on the 3rd May Conficker may well go dormant, and/or change into something else. Something is going to change this time. “The lesson of Conficker is pretty simple – patch your systems and pay attention to basic configuration settings like passwords. We strongly encourage organisations to be proactive in protecting themselves from Conficker and other malicious viruses by keeping their security up-to-date on an ongoing basis, not just as a reaction to the latest threat to hit the news.”
Shavlik's senior vice president of sales and marketing Chris Schwartzbauer claimed that this could be a situation that will unfold over time, and that there is the possibility of it all being a hoax, where ‘someone could be playing chicken with the industry'.
The E variant of Conficker was detected just before the Easter holiday. Rik Ferguson, senior security advisor at Trend Micro, claimed that it is now using a previously established P2P network to contact and network with other infected machines.
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