The joy of being in the IT business. Everybody I know has called asking about the conflicker virus.
Realistically we have very little to worry about, as North American computers account for only ~6% of the infected machine (India has an astonishing 45%). But it’s good to see people concerned about security, and so I tell them the same thing I always tell people who are worried about viruses: update windows, and update your virus protection. Those two steps will keep you pretty well secured against most threats.
If you are truly worried about this particular worm you can go to www.bdtools.net and download a removal tool (and a network-rollout tool for us IT peeps) to detect and remove the worm, big thanks to the BitDefender folks for hosting that site which will hopefully stay ahead of the virus’ web redirection for a while.
You can also sign up for OpenDNS, who is updating the list of known information providing domains that the virus might send requests to, and preventing access to them on registered networks.
Or you can turn your computer off and pretend that somehow tomorrow the virus won’t exist. :-) People are funny.
So far everything seems quiet (thanks Dagny for that link).
Have a great day everybody!
6 comments:
The big joke will be that it will deploy at 11:59PM just before April 2nd...when everyone thinks all is well and BAM!! We'll never know what hit us!
;)
Brandy - It wouldn't surprise me in the least. And while we may only comprise a small percentage of infected machines now, that could all change very quickly.
When I heard about it, I just updated Windows and updated AVG, Ad-Aware and Spybot. It's good to know from an IT man that those were the right things to do! x
Kitty - Indeed you should be safe. I checked AVG's site and they state that they do protect against all known variants. :)
Simply keeping up to date on your software will prevent about 90% of all problems.
You know, I hear about viruses and basically let it go in one ear and out the other. I keep everything updated, and I have AVG as well, and I don't open or click on anything I don't trust 'cause I've been around the internets far too long to be fooled.
I hope my bravado doesn't land me in deep shit one day haha.
Melissa - You are probably better off than me. :) I go to all sorts of dark and dirty places on the net. And somehow I rarely come up with any infections. My luck is holding up (knock on wood).
Post a Comment