Don't Give Crooks a Key to your Computer

When I left home this morning, my computer was as secure as a computer can be - totally safe from viruses, Trojan horses, and all other forms of malware.

Of course, it was switched off. Once it's powered up and linked to the Internet, crooks from around the world go to work. They may want to swipe credit card numbers or bank account data. Or they might try to make my computer a zombie, so it can attack other machines by remote control.

Internet security can never be perfect, since the bad guys never stop inventing ways to hit us. But that's no excuse for neglecting the basics.

First, keep all your software up to date. Download and install patches against newly discovered security threats. Millions of people don't bother. We know this because at least nine million Windows PCs are infected by a malware program called Conficker. Windows computers with the latest patches are safe from Conficker and many other threats.

Boston Globe - Full Story

PandaLabs: Conficker Worm, a Global Menace

The study that involved almost 2 million computers, reported the infection to have originated in China. It reported the worm to have had extended across 83 countries, and was particularly virulent in Spain, the USA, Taiwan, Brazil and Mexico.

"Of the 2 million computers analyzed, around 115,000 were infected with this malware, a phenomenon we haven't seen since the times of the great epidemics of Kournikova or Blaster", said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs.

The worm variants are launching brute force attacks to extract passwords from infected computers, and the frequency of weak passwords (common words, own names, etc.) has aided the distribution of this worm - said the report.

The worm uses an innovative system of social engineering to spread via USB devices: The report said that the that the worm uses the Windows options menu that appears when inserting a USB device, and then disguised the option to run the program (activating the malware) to open the folder to see the file.