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Conficker, the Internet worm that caused a mild panic reminiscent of Y2K late last month, but which failed to do anything spectacular that would have warranted the breathless coverage on 60 Minutes ("The Internet is Infected"), has finally woken up. This morning the worm  started to update itself via a peer-to-peer network between infected machines after downloading its payload from a server in South Korea.

An internet worm that uses social engineering to direct you to a malicious web page is nothing new - that's just everyday malware. But there is something different about the latest variant of the Waledac worm: it uses geolocation services to target its intended victims. Initially, the Waledac worm sends a spam email message claiming there has been a dirty bomb explosion in "your city." If the victim clicks through on the provided link, the worm then uses a geo-IP lookup service to customize the story appearing on the malicious site which is designed to look like that of news agency Reuters.

"Koobface" is the name of the Trojan worm that's been making its way through the social networking site Facebook lately, but to the site's users, it's been simply known as "the Facebook virus." That name will soon become a misnomer, though, because the worm is now spreading outside of Facebook's walls to attack other social networks like Bebo, MySpace, Friendster, MyYearbook, and Blackplanet.