Conficker Worm/Virus, Removal and Prevention

Conficker worm is considered to be one of the most widespread infections today considering the announcement of an anti-virus company that it already infects 9 million PC world wide. This virus, which is also known as Downup, Downandup and Kido, utilizes autorun.inf in USB sticks/flash drives to spread plus injecting itself through the network shares and to the registry of the Windows system via the vulnerability of the Windows operating system with no security patches prior to October 2008. Conficker was first detected last October 2008 and in just a small span of time, it already infected a lot of computers around the world. UK Ministry of Defense and various hospitals from Sheffield reported that they were infected by this wild Conficker worm.

Windows family of OS is the only target of this worm from Windows 2008, Vista to XP Home and Professional edition. According to Microsoft Support, to prevent such infection of this virus, operating system  installed prior to October 2008 should be updated to the recent security patches provided by Microsoft. Recent maliscious software removal tool of Microsoft can detect and remove this infection. However, if the system is already infected, it prevents you to access security related website thus disallowing you to access Microsoft Support page and other anti-virus websites that can help you remove this infection. You need to remove it manually or via an anti-virus program from another computer. Microsoft Support at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962007 provided a step-by-step instruction on how to remove the infection manually.

Latest news about this worm said that the payload of Conficker is still about to come and just waiting for it to be activated. The high-tech culprit behind this is not yet traced but being tracked down by authorities. What the security experts scared about this infection now is that the possibility that someone might discover the activation of this worm and the uncertainties on how many computers can be accessed by hackers with full administration rights. Companies and organizations around the world that uses a unupdated operating systems are in danger of this security issue and should act on this immediately.

If you want to avoid/prevent this kind of infection to your PCs using Microsoft’s OS, make sure that you always update the system with the security patches from them. It will only take a minute to do that and it will be for the best of your system so you should provide time for it. If you neglect it, you might lost a lot of things. Be aware and be updated. Get a security patch always! 🙂

For related news and stories about Conficker, just visit the following sites:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7832652.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962007