Information About Conficker

[Tami]

This article was originally published before the April 1 "launch date" for Conficker, but I think it contains some good information for those who got hit by the virus.

[url=\"http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Conficker-What-It-Is-How-To-Stop-It-and-Why-You-May-Already-Be-Protected-741288/\"]Conficker: What It Is, How to Stop It and Why You May Already Be Protected[/url]
By Jason Brooks

With a suspected April 1 trigger, Conficker is set to rear its ugly head again. eWEEK Labs examines the worm's potential for problems, and why the vulnerability it exploits should cause IT managers to think twice about Windows upgrades--and alternatives to Windows.

Conficker is a work of malware that, in the form of multiple variants, has been worming its way through unpatched Windows desktop and server machines for the past four months.

Conficker has garnered mainstream attention of late due to an April 1 trigger that researchers have identified in the most recent variant of the worm. On this date, it appears that Conficker-infected machines will change the way that they "phone home" to fetch new code and instructions from whoever holds the worm's reins.

In October 2008 Microsoft released a fix for the vulnerability that Conficker exploits, in a patch that Microsoft deemed critical enough to release outside of its typical Patch Tuesday schedule. Still, enough Windows machines have remained unpatched for Conficker to spread to what security researchers estimate to be millions of machines.

Presumably, the goal of Conficker's controllers involves the creation of a botnet that would carry out illegal machine-based activities by proxy, but there's no telling exactly what the worm's makers have in mind.

The prescription for Conficker prevention is prompt system patching (particularly when Microsoft singles out a fix for out-of-band distribution), combined with client firewall and anti-virus software for blocking the worm's activities and detecting and eliminating the malware where it surfaces.

In addition, members of the security community have prepared a set of freely available tools to aid in Conficker detection and removal for infected systems on your network.

More broadly, Conficker calls attention to the problems inherent in deploying client systems that offer up network-facing services to anonymous nodes, and highlights the importance of watching more closely the privileges granted to the system-level applications that run on mainstream operating systems.

[url=\"http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Conficker-What-It-Is-How-To-Stop-It-and-Why-You-May-Already-Be-Protected-741288/\"][i]Continue reading the article over at eWeek...[/i][/url]

[Josh]

To my surprise my computer started working fine excluding websites loading. (Microsoft.com for example) After I used a Symantic tool to get rid of Conficker (note it took for freaking ever!) everything started working. BUT Symantic said I didn't have Conficker. Which is weird.

Who knows.

We wiped one of the spare computers we have here and installed Windows XP. First thing we did was go to the websites we haven't been able to access the past few days. Guess what? Fresh install of XP couldn't access the websites either. We're calling our ISP as I write this to see what's up.

Thanks for posting this article, Tami!