New variant of Conficker causing alarm March 30, 2009
Posted by lightourworld in Conficker Worm.Tags: Conficker Worm
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I manage a medium sized network with three different geographic locations here in Charleston SC. I just wrote the following information in the body of an e-mail that I sent out to the users here. I want to share it with you so that you too can be aware and take appropriate measures to protect yourself.
If you go to http://www.symantec.com/norton/theme.jsp?themeid=conficker_worm you can watch Leslie Stahl of CBS News speaking to Steve Trilling of Symantec VP Security Tech & Response about the impact of the Conficker worm. I highly recommend that you watch this video at home tonight especially if you have high speed Internet.
What you hear from this interview will probably make you want to unplug your computer from the Internet and just stay offline. On Friday I thought that all of the “hype” about April 1st was just that, pure hype. Unfortunately there is some truth in the fact that we need to be very careful and make sure that our Microsoft patches are up to date and our Anti Virus definitions are up to date. Here at the office I spend a lot of time doing just that. Does that mean that we will not be infected by the newest strain of Conficker? No, it does not. Network engineers at CBS News spent 10 days tracking down a conficker infection on their network and the engineers felt as if they were pretty safe.
In the video you will notice that they spoke about the following ways of “catching” a virus on the Internet.
· Clicking on a website URL (http://whatever.com)
· Using FREE P2P (point to point) File Sharing services to download FREE music and videos (Limewire or Bit Torrent)
· Clicking on a website URL from within your inbox on MySpace and Facebook. (Social Networking websites)
· Not updating your Microsoft Operating system on a regular basis
· Not updating your Anti Virus definitions on a regular basis
· Not having a good spyware detection software installed
· Not scanning your system on a regular basis with all of the above
· Not using a firewall product that monitors both inbound and outbound traffic while you are on the Internet
· Not keeping close tabs on bank account transactions if you do banking online
In this video you will watch the Symantec representative show Leslie how clicking on an e-mail received from within Facebook caused her machine to be infected and a program called a “keylogger” started logging all of her keystrokes which is then viewable on a hacker’s computer in real time. That means that anything you type including personal financial information, user id’s and passwords etc are being seen by someone that will attempt to use that information to rob you blind.
If you have teens at home who are on the Internet please make sure that you KNOW what they are doing online and that you take the proper steps to secure the computer by running MS Updates, Anti Virus software, a firewall and then to educate the teens as to what is acceptable usage and what is not acceptable.
Two weeks ago my 16 year old daughter was using Limewire (P2P Network) to download FREE music into iTunes on one of my network computers at home. The machine was so infected that it destroyed the XP Professional Operating system and I had to spend several hours wiping the disk and starting over from scratch and reloading everything. Luckily for me all of my data was on a separate drive that did not get infected. Please let that be a warning to you to be aware of the dangers and to take steps to hopefully keep from being a victim.
