There’s a Windows worm running wild out there—“skyrocketing,” in BBC parlance—so you’d best have your install all patched up and your anti-virus software up to date. Or, you know, get a Mac, biased Biggs often jokes in the official CrunchGear chat room.
The worm, primarily known as Conflicker, spread widely over the holidays, when companies’ IT staffs were on break. It does pretty much all the nasty things that worms are known to do: sneak in, either via the Internet or via the old Sneakernet (USB drives and the like), change your password, start running services that download further code from some Web site, etc.
Microsoft has already issued a patch, and anti-virus software has been updated, too. So if you get infected, well, it’s your own fault.
“Bottom line it for me, Sam.” Patch up!
Photo: Flickr
You should also turn off the “autoplay” feature on your Windows computer.
The Autoplay feature started with CDs and then migrated to removable drives and newer flash drives. When you put an autoplay configured CD in the computer while Windows is running, the computer will launch the CD or Open content or execute specified programs. Removable drives and newer USB flash drives can do this too, and if the programs execute in the background, like worms and viruses like to, you don’t know you are running the code.
If you disable autoplay it keeps most of these programs on removable media from executing and infecting your system.
Windows Tweaking Tools often have settings to do this easily.
Or just turn on automatic updates. The patch for this was release on October 23rd already!
The majority of infections are in China, Russia and India – no doubt people with pirated copies of Windows. That is the real story here.
How can I know if its a worm or, not?