Protecting Against the Rampant Conficker Worm – PC World.
It’s called conficker or downandup and it’s another attack against a bad design in the windows system. Conficker affects ALL versions of windows in one form or another. The primary means of infection is through a now patched windows file sharing service. This means it can rapidly spread through a network environment that is not patched. ECC at first did not consider this to be a major security issue.; The major issue now is that conficker will attempt to spread internally and anywhere else it can access. It has been shown to create a botnet which means your machine is effectively under remote control from a third party. This makes conficker a serious issue.
Part of conficker’s propagation is it radonaly generated new internet domains to transmit it’s status to a controller. The comains are then torn down within days to avoid paying fees and the worm has already recived it’s new set of instructions by this time. It has also been causing site outages and possible phising sites as many of the domains it’s creating are very close to legitamate site names. Conficker is now alos highly effective in spreading through usb devices including mp3 players.
If you get this worm ECC reccomends a backup/format/reinstall due to how ingrained into the system this malware digs. The best way to fix this worm is to make sure you are behind a router fo some kind AND that your windows updates are updated.