While World Health Organization experts alert the world to a potential swine flu epidemic, a viral threat of another kind, a software worm, “is slowly being activated, weeks after being dismissed as a false alarm,” say computer security experts. Jim Finkle, reporting for Reuters, writes that the malevolent Conficker program ” is quietly turning thousands of personal computers into servers of e-mail spam and installing spyware.”

We first wrote about this late last March, when alerts went out over the Internet that an attack would be unleashed on April Fool’s Day. Though it failed (to our knowledge) to materialize, authorities were by no means satisfied that the threat was a prank or the software was a dud. The ultimate game plan of Conficker’s programmers – criminal, political, vandalism, hoax – is unknown, but we do know that it is designed to surreptitiously install a botnet virus on a PC (it hasn’t yet developed a taste for Macs) that enslaves the computer, directing it to send out email spam. The computer’s owner has no clue that this is going on under his nose.

“This is probably one of the most sophisticated botnets on the planet,” Reuter’s Finkle quotes Trend Micro’s Paul Ferguson. “The guys behind this are very professional. They absolutely know what they are doing.”

Stay alert: the worm’s creators are by no means finished with us.

RC