On Tuesday, computers infected by the Conficker worm woke up and downloaded a new variant. Named “Worm.Downad.E” by Trend Micro, “Conficker.AQ” by antivirus vendor Eset and “Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Kido.o” by antivirus vendor Kaspersky Labs, this new variant has left many security threat researchers bewildered. One conundrum: They don’t know why it has a kill switch that apparently kicks in on May 3. Also, the new variant has a mysterious dropped component. It will eventually delete that component, and researchers are still trying to figure out why.
