I’m on the Andy Bumatai show discussing the Conficker/Downadout worm

I’ll be on the Andy Bumatai Show today at 1 PM Hawaii time. That’s 7 PM for the East Coast, and 4 PM on the West Coast. It’s a live web­cast, and the seg­ment will be posted on his site and on YouTube later.

We’ll be talk­ing about the Conficker/Downadout worm that is sched­uled to do some­thing inter­est­ing on 1 April 2009. No one quite knows what will hap­pen, but Microsoft believes that up to 30% of Win­dows com­put­ers are vul­ner­a­ble to this attack.

If you haven’t run Win­dows Update lately or updated your antivirus soft­ware, you may be at risk. Recent ver­sions of this worm actu­ally try to block these updates while turn­ing the com­puter into a zom­bie or bot server. Over time, you’ll notice that your com­puter is run­ning slower, and you’ll never real­ize that your files might be get­ting shared or uploaded to some­one else’s server. Microsoft sug­gests open­ing an alter­nate update site (http://safety.live.com) in Inter­net Explorer if Win­dows Update doesn’t load.

If you have a Mac or you don’t use Win­dows on your com­puter, you’ll prob­a­bly be fine. It never hurts to be care­ful, though. Res­i­den­tial users can change the DNS set­tings on their com­puter and router to access OpenDNS, a free ser­vice that is block­ing this worm. Check my OpenDNS arti­cles below for details on this 5-minute fix.

Win­dows servers are also affected by this worm, so many com­pa­nies, gov­ern­ments, uni­ver­si­ties and other orga­ni­za­tions are scal­ing up their efforts to patch their servers. Peo­ple who use a com­puter at their office or school should check with their IT staff, espe­cially if they use a USB stick to trans­fer files between computers.

These arti­cles have some excel­lent back­ground information.

• CNN: No joke in April Fools’ Day com­puter worm
• New York Times: The Con­ficker Worm: April Fool’s Joke or Unthink­able Disaster?
• PC World: Con­ficker Worm Attack Get­ting Worse: Here’s How to Pro­tect Yourself
• Soft­pe­dia: $250,000 Reward for the Author of Nasty Worm Affect­ing Win­dows 7, Vista and XP
• Wikipedia: Con­ficker

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• OpenDNS
• 25 July 2008: Fix­ing the DNS security hole
• 24 April 2008: Change that pass­word into a passphrase
• 15 Jan­u­ary 2008: OpenDNS update
• 13 July 2007: Speed up your broad­band connection with OpenDNS
• 11 Jan­u­ary 2007: How to cre­ate a secure password

Image cour­tesy of Osama Alas­siry on Flickr via Cre­ative Com­mons license.

Tagged as: authentication, crime, malware, Microsoft, opendns, password, security, virus, Windows