April 1st entered our planet early yesterday, first reaching Auckland, New Zealand and soon after Tokyo, Japan. As the calendar stepped forward throughout Asia there was little evidence of any action or movement on the part of the Conficker virus. Noted computer security firm F-Secure was the first to report that infected computers in that area of the world had indeed become active and as their programming dictated, were searching the internet at predetermined locations for new instructions from Conficker's creators, instructions that didn't appear. As the calendar turned over across the globe, infected computers in additional countries became active and joined in the hunt for new instructions. London, Paris, Rome, Reykjavik, New York, San Francisco, all entered the new day, adding new populations of infected computers to the Conficker network, all searching for updated instructions and all coming up empty. 

According to a report that was released by IBM's security experts late Monday, the majority of Conficker-infected computers reside within Asia (44%) and Europe (31%) and in the coming hours it will be these areas that will soon advance their calendars to April 2nd. 

Here's where we stand right now.

Computers infected by the Conficker virus around the world have become active and have engaged in searching randomly-generated domain names in search for new instructions from Conficker's creators. These commands can unite these infected computers together, organizing them to share files and information, and like any large computer network be used to perform any number of tasks.

So far the creators of Conficker have not issued any such commands and the infected computer network currently sits, unused.

There is no expiry date on the Conficker virus, infected computers will remain active and in search of new instructions even as the day changes to April 2nd. Although it appears that we will see no activity today, an event can still take place in the coming days and beyond.

However, security firms and researchers around the world are actively working to block communication between the infected computers, to prevent them from receiving new instructions for use, and so this pressure might move the creators of Conficker to act, to use their newly acquired computer network or risk losing it.

In the meantime, April Fool's is taking place as it always has online and you can see many of today's jokes from Google, Yahoo, Opera, and ThinkGeek at my CTV blog - http://krisabel.ctv.ca/