On Sunday night, 60 Minutes aired a story on the Conficker Worm (a virus). I thought the story had some pretty good information, although it came across as an ad for Symantec as well. Here is a link to the segment of the show.
Conficker attacks a known issue in Windows that Microsoft created a patch for back in October 2008. I posted an article here back in October that discussed how to get the patch and how to tell if the patch has been installed on your computer. You can view that article here.
This worm is getting a bit of air play right now because one of the variants is expected to cause various types of issues on April 1st.
So what should you do regarding this virus. First, make sure you have the latest virus definition files for your AntiVirus software. If you hover over or click on your AV icon on right side of your taskbar, you should see the version and possibly date of the last update. Make sure it is recent. Note that one of the symptoms of this virus is that it disables the updating portion of your AV program. If you are not getting updates you may be infected. The next thing is to make sure you have the latest Windows updates installed on your computer. If you are on our Monitoring Service that includes updates, you should be all set.
Make sure your staff are aware of this issue. Computer users need to be constantly reminded of safe computing practices. Your computer usage policies need to be constantly reviewed to insure that you are protecting your IT assets as well as you can.
Let me ask this question. You know those users that are logging in to your network from home. Do they have the latest AV updates on their computers? The latest Windows updates? Are they already infected and connecting in?
How about the person that comes in to your office for what ever reason, the accountant, consultant, auditor. If they connect their laptop to your network either by wireless or wire, can you answer the above questions? Just something to think about.
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