Conficker Worm

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Be careful. There are some sites out there that claim to help you find out if you have the worm- and they are actually set up to infect you with it when you go to the site and start clicking around following instructions. I wouldn't trust any site other than well known sites such as Microsoft.com or Symantic.com, or other well known anti-virus sites.
The best defense?- keep your OS updated with security updates, and keep a good anti-virus program updated and running in the background at all times. A firewall too.

[firenze11]

Also, be careful if you're on a Mac and are running Windows on Parallels (or probably Bootcamp for that matter). They can be affected if they run Windows.

[tzvia]

If you keep your AV software up to date, patch your computers, and watch where you surf and what you download and install, your odds of catching something go down. It also helps to have a good quality router/firewall between yourself and the internet, along with a software firewall product. Part of my job is virus control at work; I'm responsible for 3400 desktops, and I cleaned up several Conflickers last week, before the AV vendor had a pattern file for it. Most our viruses (really worms and trojans these days), come in from our 700 laptop users who take their machines outside our proxy/perimeter, get infected, then bring the machine back in. Once they are outside, we can't control how/where they are used.

I clean malicious software for a living, and while Conflicker sounded really bad in the news, it was an easy one to clean up manually. I've seen far worse.

[Mr. Bloom]

tzvia:

I've heard that a wireless router acts as a firewall by itself...is this true?

"Watching where you surf"...are these issues still contained to the porn/spam sites or have the offensive sites become more mainstream?

Thoughts?

[OakLeaf]

I don't know much about this stuff, but I do know that wireless routers sold for home use normally have a firewall built in. You still have to set it up, same as you do with your computer's built-in firewall, but my limited experience is that routers ship with their firewall defaults set a lot tighter than Windows does.


But actually, the reason I'm posting here this morning is that two of my favorite sites appear to have been hacked (and one of them is the Superbike World Championship, which may not be F1 or MotoGP, but there's enough money behind it that they ought to run a pretty tight website). I don't know if the Downadup/Conficker worm has anything to do with it, but it's kind of coincidental, two sites the same day.

[emily_in_nc]

Be careful. There are some sites out there that claim to help you find out if you have the worm- and they are actually set up to infect you with it when you go to the site and start clicking around following instructions.

Sorry Lisa -- I should have noted that the site I linked to was provided in the "Windows Secrets" newsletter I get weekly. It's legit, well-respected, and hasn't steered me wrong in years of reading. They sent an entire issue about Conficker within the past week, and the site in my post above was one they mentioned. It's legit. But I do completely agree with what you say and would never have gone there if I hadn't read about it in Windows Secrets. I've been online for fourteen years and have never been infected because I am cautious to the point of paranoia -- and I'm a software developer myself.