The Web Standards Project (WaSP) has just announced that members of the Internet Information Security Consortium (I2SecC) have discovered the real purpose of the infamous Conficker Worm, set to wreak havoc on millions of compromised systems on April 1st.
WaSP has also discovered that the best way to fight this malware is to ensure your websites are standards-compliant:
In order to ensure you do not fall victim to the worm’s botnet, I2SecC recommends immediate validation of the markup and supporting stylesheets for any Web site that you maintain and correcting any errors that are uncovered. As yet, it is unclear whether the worm will target sites that make use of non-standard DOM scripting; however, a message found by I2SecC researchers in an online forum believed to be from the worm’s creator or a close associate hints that it will: “your document.all are belong to us.”
April Fool’s! If only we could save the world from malware with web standards!
Conficker is very real, however, so please exercise caution today.