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Be Aware: Conficker Comes April 1st
March 31, 2009 — Casey AndrewsEditors Note: Techtronic has been replaced by Not Just Gaming (http://notjustgaming.com). NJG features all of the great posts from Techtrionic, as well as articles, blogs, community, social profiles, forums, downloads, videos, and more! Click here to visit Not Just Gaming .com!
April 1st nears and security experts claim that the Conficker virus will activate with wide infection, and become the worst infection since the SQL Slammer virus. It was estimated that up to 15 million systems were already infected by Conficker on January 26, not counting the new number of infections since.
Nobody exactly knows what Conficker.C is supposed to do on April 1st, other than receive and and execute instructions from various remote systems, but it is presumed that infected computers will become minions of some huge botnet, with some nefarious purpose such as a large denial of service attack on a singular or group of entities or perhaps steal huge quantities of personal information. Or wipe everyone’s hard disks.
But basically the estimated symptoms have been released as:
- Account lockout policies being reset automatically
- Disabling Automatic Updates
- Disabling Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)
- Disabling Windows Defender
- Disabling Error Reporting Services disabled
- Domain controllers responding slowly to client requests
- System network becoming unusually congested
- Websites related to antivirus software, such as browser based scanners become inaccessible
- Trafic on port 445 on non – Directory Service (DS) services
On 15 October 2008 Microsoft released a patch (MS08-067) to fix the vulnerability. It should be noted that this patch was released prior to the creation and release of the Conficker worm. Removal tools are available from Microsoft, BitDefender, ESET, Symantec, Sophos, and Kaspersky Lab, while McAfee and AVG can remove it with an on-demand scan. While Microsoft has released patches for the later Windows XP Service Packs 2 and 3 and Windows 2000 SP4 and Vista, it has not released any patch for Windows XP Service Pack 1 or earlier versions (excluding Windows 2000 SP4), as the support period for these service packs has expired. Since the virus can spread via USB drives that trigger AutoRun, disabling the AutoRun feature for external media (through modifying the Windows Registry) is recommended. However the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team describes Microsoft’s guidelines on disabling Autorun as being “not fully effective,” and they provide their own guides. Microsoft has released a removal guide for the worm via the Microsoft website.
