Astounded by what I read today, about 30%, that’s 3 out of 10, PCs are unprotected against a worm (a type of computer virus) that infected several million PCs causing havoc months ago.
The presence of the “Downadup” worm, or “Conficker”, has increased dramatically recently infecting around 3.5 million PCS according to Finnish security company F-Secure. The worm exploits a bug in Windows server service used in Windows 2000, XP,
Microsoft issued a patch for this in late October 2008 (MS08-067), but after 3 months 30% of PCs still did not have the update, the majority of these being corporate networked PCs.
This highlights the significant need to take security seriously, all PCs are potentially at risk from malware attack. There are a number of simple steps that can be taken
1 Make sure that your PC software is up to date, this includes the operating system. For Windows PCs and servers make sure that Windows update is accessed regularly, better still automate checking by setting a time on the PC for access, at least weekly.
2 If an anti-virus program is not installed, then do so now. There is a certain complacency about using anti-virus, in that “it will always be someone else” that gets infected, you could be that someone else. Just as important is to keep the anti-virus program files up to date, again do an update at least every week. An up to date anti-virus program is OK, but use it, scan the PC for problems.
3 Take precautions to prevent unwanted intrusions into the PC, install a firewall. For most users this is a bit of software that monitors the network connection, whether it be wireless, cabled, or direct to the telephone line. In very simple terms, a firewall prevents 2 things, firstly unwanted intruders gaining access to the PC, and secondly prevents unauthorised access to the outside network for programs already installed on your PC.
4 Email is one area by which viruses are spread. There are 2 precautions that can be taken here, firstly have any emails sent in plain text, its easier to hide a virus in an HTML formatted email, and secondly, only open attachments from those you know to trusted, not from unknown sources, and have these scanned by the virus checker too.
There are a good deal of security software available free and commercial ty searching for antivirus software, security software, and firewall software in any of the major Search Engines.
Just as a final note on this, Microsoft have updated their Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) to deal with the Conficker issue also.
