It’s still not clear what, if anything, millions of Microsoft Windows systems infected with the much-hyped Conficker worm will do in the next 12 hours, when the systems are expected to seek out new instructions from the worm’s author(s). If anything significant does happen, however, it will disproportionately affect PCs and networks in Asia, Europe and South America, and comparatively few systems in North America, new research suggests. Researchers at IBM’s Internet Security Systems say they found a way to decode the encryption that masks the data shared by peer-to-peer communications software planted on all systems infected by Conficker.C. As a result, ISS has been able to begin charting the location of infected systems across the globe. According to ISS, only 6 percent of the known infections are located in North America, let alone the United States. In contrast, nearly 45 percent of infections are in Asia, while Europe accounts