Conficker has not struck yet. Are you protected?
I wrote about the Conficker worm that is wiggling around the interwebs on April 1st. Either it was an unsuccessful deployment of the worm or it is waiting. Maybe Conficker is out partying.
Have you updated your machine so that you are protected? Check out this Microsoft Security Bulletin here.
Scroll down and you will see links for each operating system and service pack revision. Simply click on the hyperlink for your OS and download the <1mb patch. This will plug up the hole that Conficker is going to try and use.
These are the links for the update:
- Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4
- Windows XP Service Pack 2
- Windows XP Service Pack 3
- Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
- Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Service Pack 2
- Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1
- Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2
- Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition
- Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition Service Pack 2
- Windows Server 2003 with SP1 for Itanium-based Systems
- Windows Server 2003 with SP2 for Itanium-based Systems
- Windows Vista and Windows Vista Service Pack 1
- Windows Vista x64 Edition and Windows Vista x64 Edition Service Pack 1
- Windows Server 2008 for 32-bit Systems*
- Windows Server 2008 for x64-based Systems*
- Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems
So do yourself and everyone else on your network a favor and get your machines updated! If you are not using WSUS for your network you might want to re-think that! We did a WSUS article a while back and you can find it here.
April 3, 2009 - 5:24 am
While the worm is very real, and I actually first saw it a few weeks ago on a home machine I support, it is the equivalent of how the news covers an impending blizzard that turns into 1.5″ of light snow.
It is WAY over blown. Yes, the worm is real and it can be a big time problem, but the doom and gloom that was portrayed by it was simply sad.
Where was this coverage when Melissa was coming out or Slammer? Those two bugs were much more destructive.
Of course if there are, as estimated, 10 million PCs infected with it out there, that is one hell of a botnet that can wreak some serious havoc on whomever the master decides to sick his hoard upon.
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Johnny Admins Reply:
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:30 am
You can say that again man! I also saw a video online of a BBC report of them taking control of a botnet (20,000+ users) for fun. They changed some backgrounds to let the users know that they have been hacked. Now imagine what you could do with 10 million PC’s?
DOS all day long huh.
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April 6, 2009 - 7:12 pm
Quite a list you put together but I was, at first, more than a little disappointed that my OS wasn’t included.
Oh, nevermind. I just remembered. I’m using Linux.
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Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
April 7th, 2009 at 3:50 am
Hahahaa good 1 :)
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