Conficker Worm April 1 Activation Date

What's in store for us on April 1st 2009 with the Conficker worm?

There are a lot of educated guesses being floated, many of which are in this New York Times piece on the Conficker activation.

As the piece points out,

"It is possible to detect and remove Conficker using commercial antivirus tools offered by many companies. However, the most recent version of the program has a significantly improved capacity to remove commercial antivirus software and to turn off Microsoft’s security update service.

"It can also block communications with Web services provided by security companies to update their products. It even systematically opens holes in firewalls in an effort to improve its communication with other infected computers."

For more information on detecting it, here's the Microsoft Conficker detection tool and Norton instructions on how to manually remove Conficker.