Saturday, January 24, 2009

Protect Yourself Against the Worm that has Infected Over 9 Million in Two Weeks

One of the biggest worm attacks in years has hit PCs around the world. It's called "Downadup," or "Conficker," and in the past week or so it has spread aggressively to unprotected PCs.

The worm spreads across networks, finding vulnerable computers and turning off the automatic backup service, deleting previous restore points, disabling some security services, and blocking access to security Web sites before spreading to other computers on the network.

It also spreads through USB devices such as flash drives and cameras by taking advantage of the Windows Autorun feature, which will automatically run programs installed on USB devices as soon as they're plugged in. You can try disabling Autorun to prevent infection, but at least one security expert says that Microsoft's own instructions about disabling Autorun are flawed.

If you suspect your machine is infected, please read the instructions below and don't hesitate to give us a call or contact us here for more guidance.

CMIT Solutions recommends you take the following steps to protect your own PC from Downadup or Conficker:

1. Make sure you have a good security suite installed, such as Norton Internet Security, Norton AntiVirus, Norton 360, BitDefender, or AVG. A free version of any of these products is not as thorough or comprehensive as one of the paid versions.

2. Run a full system scan and update your security definitions.

3. Keep your computer updated with any patches that Microsoft has issued recently.

If you're worried that your computer has already been infected, take the following steps:

1. Run a virus scan, which should detect the worm if it's there.

2. If you don't have antivirus software installed, try visiting a few security sites. If your access to those sites is blocked, that’s one sign of infection.

I have included detailed removal instructions by Symantec here.

Posted via web from evanstein's posterous

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