April Fools Virus On Schedule

I don’t normally pass along virus alerts because they are often outdated and obsolete, but this one is strait from my IBM inbox.  You may have heard about a virus that is set to strike on April 1st in the news recently.  It is called Conficker.C and you can read more about how it works by visiting these addresses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker
http://mtc.sri.com/Conficker/addendumC/

As stated in the links above, the virus takes advantage of a buffer-overflow vulnerability of certain server services on Windows based machines.  Microsoft issued an update (MS08-067) for Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2 & SP3, and Vista to patch this hole back in October of last year. So if you have installed all available Windows updates you should be fine and not need to worry.  It is highly recommended you install all available updates if you have not done so lately.  To force your PC to check for available updates, click Start>All Programs>Windows Update and follow the on-screen instructions.

If your computer is directly connected to the Internet it is advised that you have a quality software firewall installed and blocking unexpected inbound traffic.  A comparison of free firewall software can be found here:  http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-firewall.htm

In addition you should also have a quality anti-virus software solution in place.  Any of the following will suffice:

I personally recommend  AVG Free Edition

In summery:

  • Be sure to apply all available updates for Microsoft Windows
  • Ensure you have some form of firewall blocking unwanted network traffic
  • Install a quality anti-virus solution

Now lets all have a happy April Fools day!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Announcement, Internet, News, Security, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “April Fools Virus On Schedule”

  1. Lswest Says:
    April 4th, 2009 at 1:13 pm

    I’d also add Avast! Anti-Virus Free to the list, since it offers on-boot virus checking (very useful, I actually just recently replaced AVG Free Edition with it on my XP partition since I needed an on-boot scanner).

    Just a suggestion,
    Lswest

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