Rather than attacking typical plant or animal cells, the bacteriophage uses bacteria as its host for replication. Highly specialized, the bacteriophage lands on a specific part of a specific bacteria, and just like a syringe with legs, injects its genetic material (which is stored in that big bulb on top).

It only takes minutes for viral mRNA to convince bacterial ribosomes to makes its own proteins, transforming the bacteria into a virus factory that, in some circumstances, will literally burst with its own product.

For those who believe that a benevolent supreme being created life, it would be only natural to believe that the bacteriophage was spawned from a equally powerful source of evil.

Of course, Man has long reimagined the bacteriophage as a tool for everything from antibiotic alternatives (see what's called phage therapy, a century old idea) to FDA-approved food sprays. While it's easy to consider nanobots as the future of Man's biological domination, sometimes using the machines that nature has already left lying around is the better bet.

Especially when they're this badass. [Image 1, 2, 3, 4]

* The lead photo is technically a nano-scale model of a T4 bacteriophage. The gallery has real shots.

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It's about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature's ultimate machine.

The way the test was conducted is that ten viruses were introduced into a clean install of Windows 7 with the UAC settings on system defaults. While only one virus was blocked, two technically did not function properly for whatever reason. Still, this doesn't leave much hope for those who decide to skip automatic patching, firewalls and anti-virus applications. Let's do the whole "Safer Computing" thing, shall we? [Sophos]

The identity theft feature, as reported by CNET, is only available in the U.S., and pairs the folks at AVG with a service called Identity Guard that integrates with your browser toolbar (Firefox and IE only); Identity Guard is there to help you avoid and handle identity theft.

Frankly, the Identity Guard addition doesn't seem like something to get all that excited about (who wants another browser toolbar, anyway?), but if nothing else, the performance boosts are worth the update for die-hard AVG fans.

AVG comes in both freeware and shareware versions, Windows only. Currently only the shareware version is ready for the update—apparently AVG delays the release of AVG Free to give their pay versions a little more time in the limelight. Unfortunately that means AVG Free users—which I suspect is most AVG users—will have to wait a bit longer to update to the faster version.

The research team of Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco say that when malware infects a system BIOS, it is able to survive multiple attempts to reflash the core software, and extremely difficult to get rid of. Even worse, because Lojack is white listed by virus and malware scanners, any attacks exploiting this vulnerability on a computer will largely go undetected. And for Laptop Lojack to be effective, it must operate like a stealthy rootkit. Unfortunately, it's installed in the majority of new notebooks from HP, Asus, Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba.

Moral of the story: find a new way to get your stolen laptop back. [ZDnet via Slashdot]

Just, damn. [YouTube via Animal NY - Thanks Bucky!]

The hole, apparently caused by the interaction of IE and ActiveX, has been used for about a week to install viruses on users who click certain links in spam emails. Microsoft's stopgap solution, available here, is to disable that video software, and the company is hard at work to fix the problem. Doesn't bode well for Microsoft's push into antivirus software, does it? [via AP]

Cybersecurity expert Marcus Sachs broke the news at a security conference in San Francisco, raising the question of what would happen if this were to happen to millions of machines in the medical industry. According to sachs, the devices affected were hospital computers and devices used to control critical equipment, such as heart monitors and MRI machines.

No one is quite sure how the computers acquired the worms to begin with, but most of the Windows 2000/NT machines were to old to benefit from Microsoft's October patch which fixed many of the vulnerabilities Conficker preyed on. [Cnet via Slashdot]

The original Conficker doomsday, April 1st, came and went without serious incident. But as Mahoney explained, the worm's subtle update that day left us at much greater risk than before. This so-far inscrutable update could be the first manifestation of security experts' concerns; Trend Micro, in a blog post that sounds more like it was written by a President in an apocalypse movie than a software security expert, has only been able to determine that the payload polls popular websites to check for connectivity, then deletes itself. They speculate, however, that it could be installing a data-gathering Waledac virus.

With no actionable solution for shrinking the three-million-PC install base, we can expect to see plenty of these kinds of stories in the near future. Feel like patching yet?

Updated: It turns out the Waledac bots are rented out to spammers. Kaspersky Lab found that Conficker is downloading and installing fake security software, which will remain on your computer until you pay $49.95 to "remove" the virus from your system. All Conficker nodes have been not acting the same it seems, but the $49.95 would reveal the intentions of the virus to make money.

[BBC, PC World]

Russia and Brazil were found to be the most infected.

Other interesting findings by Microsoft's cyber security team include that, at the moment, 97% of all emails are spam. In other words, for every 3 emails you want to see, you get 97 that resemble Gizmodo's mainpage on April 1st. (And you thought we were annoying...which we were.)

More interesting stuff over at the BBC. [BBC]

Symantec's got a pretty simple (and free) tool specifically for Conficker: Download this file on an uninfected computer, follow the steps, and you should be okay. (If you can't get to Symantec or other security sites, that's a good sign you've got Conficker.) Also, via PC Mag, here's the Conficker Working Group's page of repair of tools.[Symantec]

Security expert Dan Kaminsky, working with the Honeynet Project's Tillmann Werner and Felix Leder, have discovered an easier way to detect if a machine on a network is infected by Conflicker. Dan writes:

What we've found is pretty cool: Conficker actually changes what Windows looks like on the network, and this change can be detected remotely, anonymously, and very, very quickly. You can literally ask a server if it's infected with Conficker, and it will tell you.

The code, just released today, is quickly finding its way into the scanners of all the major security software companies, and will hopefully prevent the worldwide holocaust/Russian Lolcat invasion tomorrow. We'll see! [Doxpara Research via Ars Technica]

Are Macs still too pricey, Adam? Time—what you're gonna spend getting that Trojan off your machine—is money, after all. [Twitter]

P.S. I posted this from my trojan-free Windows desktop.

The scariest thing about the Conficker worm is that literally millions of infected Windows PCs could be linked together to do its bidding. The second scariest thing is that no one really knows what its creator is going to do with this virtual army on April 1, when it's scheduled to contact a server for instructions. It's so bad, Microsoft has a running $250,000 bounty for the author, dead or alive. (Well, they probably want him alive, but they hate his guts.)

The New York Times' John Markoff rounded up some of the more ingeniously evil possibilities in a compelling article, the most sinister being a "Dark Google," postulated by University of California at San Diego researcher Stefan Savage, that would let bad people scour zombie machines all around the world for data to sell to other bad people.

But let's back up a bit. Conficker—whose weird name is a combination of "configuration" and a slightly more polite word for f***er, according to Urban Dictionary—actually began life as a lowly, "not very successful" worm in November, says Vincent Weafer, VP at Symantec Security Response. Weafer told us it exploited a Microsoft remote server vulnerability that had already been announced and patched the previous month, so the only systems that were vulnerable were the ones that weren't up to date.

The B release, pushed in December, on the other hand, was "wildly successful," says Weafer, infecting millions of unpatched computers because it's an aggressive little bastard—the first worm in years on a scale like Blaster. It has built-in p2p capabilities, and brute forces its way into open shared folders or printers, so it can crawl an office network quickly. It also piggybacks onto USB flash and hard drives. On top of all that, it's designed to be incredibly resilient, killing security software, disabling Windows Update, and digging down deep.

The C release came out this past month. It doesn't go after new machines—it's actually a payload for computers already infected with B. It transformed Conficker from a sneezing pandemic into a seriously nasty plague. With C, its p2p powers are extended further, with digital code-signing, so it only accepts trusted code updates from itself. That means security experts can't simply inject code to neutralize it. The patch also made Conficker better at killing security software. And it expanded the scope of the domains it tries to contact for instructions from 250 to 50,000, completely neutralizing security experts' previous tactic of seizing the domains. There's effectively no way to the cut the head off of this demon snake. The stage is set: On April 1, Conficker will reach out for the millions-strong zombienet's next set of instructions.

So what will happen? Well, no one knows for sure. Conficker's creator can do whatever he wants with his army. Launch massive denial-of-service attacks, setup the "Dark Google" syndicate, target millions of new machines, or generate a tidal wave of spam that'll crash against servers all over the world.

Most likely though, Weafer told us, Conficker's creator is motivated by money—they'll rent it out. And if Conficker's used as a massive doomsday tool, they'll "quickly lose the ability to make money" with it. A low key operation harnessing the power of computers that are mainly located in developing nations may not have a big impact, though it would certainly set a terrible precedent: Whatever Conficker's results, they will lead others to develop this idea in frightening new directions.

Conficker's innovative approach that utilizes p2p, code-signing and a distributed domain setup will very possibly serve as inspiration to other malware writers, who Weafer said "you can bet" are watching Conficker's success very closely, just as Conficker's creators have clearly learned from past malware. It's like evil open source.

That doesn't mean April 1 will be a "digital Pearl Harbor." If your machine is patched and up to date, the Microsoft Report's Ed Bott tells us, you'll probably be totally fine. And yes, you can get rid of it if you happen to be infected. There is an outside chance Conficker could turn into a massive parallel computer that borders on self-aware, come April 1, but more than likely, the day will come and go without you noticing anything weird, just some extra spam in your box for some V@ltr3xxx.

Still something you still wanna know? Send any questions about worms, V14GRA, or Jason Chen's pants to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

When Mark Taylor's computer had crashed, he had thought it was due to a worm in his computer. He kept getting error messages saying that "the processor fan was unworkable," and when he called IT for help, they had discovered what looked to be a rubber band, wrapped around the fan. Upon further inspection, the band turned out to be a cooked worm that had been burned and killed when the computer was switched on, causing the processor fan to jam and crash the machine.

How the earthworm actually found his way into the machine is still unknown, but Taylor could only guess that his playful cats had scared and chased the worm into the laptop, through the wider vents on the side: "The worm was obviously looking for a hiding place and must have crawled in through the air vent to get away from the cats." Aww, poor earthworm. [Telegraph - image from MicroWorld]

The software itself is disguised as a "toolbar" that car owners would need to download in order to see their crime and atone. But it's actually another trojan horse virus, one that installs endless popup windows and fake "antivirus" software and all that other garbage. It would be clever if it weren't so horribly, horribly mean. But as this technique is being used in something called Grand Forks, North Dakota, couldn't the punks be caught? After all, somebody's gotta be running around slapping fake tickets on random windshields, and how many people could there really be in Grand Forks? Eight? Nine? [Jalopnik]

The trojan has been retooled a bit too, presumably to foil the fixes that were issued after the initial iLife scare. I'm sure a patched fix will come out soon enough, but the best tactic is to avoid this kind of thing altogether by, oh, I don't know, not giving pirated software root access whenever it asks for it. [Macenstein]

You can do it all manual-like, with the following Terminal incantations (But be careful! That's some unprotected deleting going on there):

1) (open Terminal.app)

2) sudo su (enter password)

3) rm -r /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices

4) rm /private/tmp/.iWorkServices

5) rm /usr/bin/iWorkServices

6) rm -r /Library/Receipts/iWorkServices.pkg

7) killall -9 iWorkServices

Or, the folks at MacScan have released a free utility that handles the cleanup by itself. Download it here. [Macrumors]

The Trojan parks itself in your /System/Library/StartupItems folder with read-write-execute root privileges—from there it can phone home to a remote server and install additional nasties throughout your system. Right now, the only true fix is a full format and re-install, since its residual pieces can be spread far and wide. You can spot if your particular warez iWork is infected by searching for the iWorkServices.pkg inside the installer.

It was spotted security software company Intego, who have identified several OS X security threats in the past. But as far as I can tell, this is the first one to come piggybacking along with a popular software package many people are pirating (Intego says 20,000 downloads).

If you're in the demographic of folks pirating iWork '09 via BitTorrent, chances are this is as close as you're come to getting VD from an ill-advised Southeast-Asian sex-professional liaison (the online equivalent). Still, not a good precedent to set. [Intego]

Mac OS X, mythically immune to common computer plagues, has actually always welcomed antivirus software. Or, uh, maybe not. Confused? No worries—here's how OS X and Windows differ on resisting viruses and other nasties.

It's not a matter of opinion: OS X is less susceptible to catching a cold than Windows. So is Linux, for that matter. There are two major reasons (and Steve Jobs' pee actually isn't one of them). First, Windows is on 89.6 percent of the world's personal computers, while OS X is on just 8.9 percent of them. Second, the Unix architecture that OS X and Linux are based on is inherently more secure than Windows, particularly pre-Vista versions. (If these reasons are familiar to you, you may not know the subtler side-effects of each reason that strengthen the case even more, so read on.)

There are a few different ways that Microsoft's mammoth market share actually hurts Windows and helps OS X. For one, writing nastiness that the vast majority of the world's personal computers are susceptible to is a more efficient use of resources than writing the same evil for a sliver of the population. In biology, a more homogeneous population is more susceptible to a genocidal plague. Same principle applies to the vast, Windows-powered ecosystem. I don't mean someone could write a virus that wipes everybody out. Just that if everybody's running Windows, the population is a much easier target.

The flipside of this—which you might not have considered—is that most malware writers obviously use Windows. They're going to whip up code for the OS they're familiar with and know best. And more to that point, most of the tools and scripts used to wreak havoc on computers are written for Windows. The same ecosystem that provides the biggest, most susceptible audience also provides the most fertile breeding ground for the nasty executables.

But suppose this was some bizarro world where OS X was king. Would Microsoft run ads about how virus-plagued OS X was? Well, it would still be more prudent to run anti-virus software, since there'd be a lot more crap thrown at the Mac OS, but if malware acted mostly like it does today, it likely wouldn't have the same impact as it did on Windows pre-Vista.

A lot of that is because of the way permissions work in OS X vs. Windows. Basically, Unix-based systems are architected so that they require administrator privileges to modify the OS and are traditionally more strict in enforcing them. Critical areas are walled off from normal users—you see this when OS X asks for a password to install updates or change a system setting. A standard non-admin user account is restricted; bad software can't wreak much havoc at all without that password.

This is precisely what Vista's somewhat-maligned User Account Control attempts to replicate, limiting points of intrusion and requiring explicit user permission to get anywhere deep. On Windows, historically, the enforcement of these restrictions has been lax in the name of convenience.

This is not to say that OS X is invulnerable, by any means. The main applications folder is relatively unprotected, and any running app can write to it and most of what's inside. Coupled with OS X's app-bundling architecture, this makes it easier to replace program executables or sneak in a piggybacking one. Even then, however, the malware would need to elicit elevated permissions to do any hardcore damage to the core OS; it could, unfortunately, nuke your relatively unprotected Home folder though. Another point of vulnerability, or at least a pain point, according to Mac Forensics Lab, is OS X's centralized address book, which also has weak defenses. If the Home folder book did require the same level of permissions, it would be kinda unusable, because you'd have to elevate permissions to make any and every change.

This brings us to OS X's biggest security hole, the one that it actually shares with every operating system: you. It doesn't matter how good baked-in security is if a user throws out the welcome mat for whatever crap comes their way. On the flip side, you're also the first, and best, line of protection. Don't do anything stupid, and you'll be fine, anti-virus software or not—whatever OS you're running.

Something you still wanna know? Send any questions about viruses, VD or the 1995 Dustin Hoffman film Outbreak to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

The software claims to be able to scan devices and their memory cards for over 400 types of known malware, none of which, as far as I can tell, are harmful to Android phones. Now, it's not impossible that dangerous malware could find its way to you G1 in the future — in fact,Android has already experienced one security scare — but installing a piece of software that scans your device for Windows Mobile virii won't do anything to stop minor exploits like that, which can be quickly and effectively patched anyway.

Of course, all this security talk could just be there to provide parents with excuse fodder to install this on their child's G1 — it also monitors voice and text communications. Anyway, VirusGuard is already available on Handango, but will make its Marketplace debut when Google finally enables its payment system in Q1 of 2009. You misguided peace of mind will cost a whole $10, by the way. [Android Community via Slashphone]