The Conficker worm activated Wednesday. It prompted infected machines to download fake anti-virus software (SpywareProtect2009) as well as a spam bot. It's expected to perform additional activity on May 3. The purpose of the worm appears to be extortion. Here are a few detail packed articles. The neverending story Conficker botnet could flood Web with spam Researchers say Conficker is all about the money If you think you might be infected, browse the Conficker Eye Chart to find out. If you are infected, here is a description of how to Rid your computer of the Conficker virus. Comments? Thoughts? Anecdotes?

rofl. Epic. I feel bad for all the people without AV or legal copies of windows. But I guess that's what one would expect.

Why are people making such a big deal of this 'Conficker'? From all of the "reports" I've read, it barely does any real damage. Actually, what damage does it do at all? No one on any forum that I read so far is infected.

Quote: Original post by nullsquared
Why are people making such a big deal of this 'Conficker'? From all of the "reports" I've read, it barely does any real damage. Actually, what damage does it do at all? No one on any forum that I read so far is infected.

Well, first of the majority of visitors to this forum are computer literate I would assume given they are interested in programming - LOL!
Personally, my local community college business division mainly it seems was hit pretty bad. Bad enough to have to switch my speech class to a different classroom until they tried to get rid of it. I'm not suprised since it doesn't seem they are on top of keeping up with the latest windows updates and there is a lot of usb swapping going on!
Also, people that are running expired antivirus or none at all on windows and 24/7 net connection always seem to bring their infected computers to me to fix for them LOL!

[Edited by - daviangel on April 10, 2009 5:05:09 PM]

I want proper application sandboxing already. We already have file permission systems to block users from accessing each other's files -- there's no reason we can't invent similar for programs.

So far, my combination of chrome + webmail + NAT router + windows firewalls + not downloading every program on the internets seems to have done the trick in keeping me uninfected.

Quote: Original post by nullsquared
Why are people making such a big deal of this 'Conficker'? From all of the "reports" I've read, it barely does any real damage. Actually, what damage does it do at all? No one on any forum that I read so far is infected.

The danger lies in the fact that it has control of thousands of PCs around the world. That's some serious computing power at the hands of a single person (or group of people). Read up on Denial of Service attacks. That's going to be a paltry use for such an army of remote PCs. They could also brute-force the hell out of passwords and accounts.

It doesn't do any damage now. The fear surrounding this thing is that experts still have no real idea what it's going to do. But anything it does can be very bad.

Quote: Original post by daviangel
Personally, my local community college business division mainly it seems was hit pretty bad. Bad enough to have to switch my speech class to a different classroom until they tried to get rid of it. I'm not suprised since it doesn't seem they are on top of keeping up with the latest windows updates and there is a lot of usb swapping going on!

wow. Tell them to buy drive shield. When the computer restarts all the data is reverted on the drive every time. My university is pretty big on security so as far as I know we didn't even feel the problem. Also everyone is forced to run mcaffee on the network.

Quote: Original post by Gaiiden
That's going to be a paltry use for such an army of remote PCs. They could also brute-force the hell out of passwords and accounts.

Oh, now that's a good point I didn't think of...

My girlfriend got it somehow, despite having antivirus software. The AV was whining about something though, so I had a suspicion she'd gotten infected but the thing was having trouble stopping it. (Free edition, so maybe it's not quite up to snuff?) I just gave her McAfee's Stinger and it sorted the problem out nicely.

Interesting, which AV does she use? I use the free edition of avast, and I'm fine...