Conficker worm could be 'weaponized'

In the year since the inception of the Conficker worm, a malicious strain of virus that has infected computers all over the globe, security researchers have tracked its spread to as many as 7 million machines.

Although internet security researchers at the Conficker Working Group advise that it is impossible to track the exact number of PCs infected by Conficker, the latest estimates put the worm's spread at around the 7 million mark, a milestone in the making of a huge botnet, according to Computerworld.

Botnets are controlled by hackers, cyber criminals or sometimes governments for the purpose of launching spam, malware and distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS), which can overpower website servers with malicious traffic that slows or crashes websites.