Biggest Personal Computer Virus Ever?
Have you cought it yet or perhaps know anyone who has.i think they’ve been speaking about it for the past two days
This is some info on it at the bottom
This one is nasty. Quite, pretty nasty. Called “Conficker” or “Downadup,” this new PC worm has contaminated more than nine million PCs and is spreading at the rate of 1 million a day, according to the software protection firm, F-Secure. “That is vast; perhaps the biggest virus we’ve ever seen,” software security professional David Perry of Trend Micro told Agence France Presse.
Here is the real puzzler: Up till now, the virus has done no harm. Does that mean it’s impotent, or maybe does it portend a far more nefarious result? It can just be waiting to detonate, or it can be a test run by cybercriminals intent on profiting from the weakness in the future. “I think the adverse men are area testing a new technology,” Perry told AFP. “If Conficker proves to work well, they can go out and sell spyware (malicious software) to people. There is a huge market for selling criminal spyware.”
The worm is self-replicating and spreads on networks and personal computers that do not have the security patches for Windows RPC Server Service. It is able to infect machines from the World Wide Web or by concealing on USB thumb drives that carry data from one computer to another, reports AFP. Once Conficker is on a computer, it is almost impossible to take away. “Here we are with a large, large outbreak, and they hold refurbishing their methodology to increase the size of it,” Perry warned to AFP. “They might be evolving that huge botnet to slice it up and vend it on the criminal market.” If that occurred, the contaminated computers would be “zombie”machines that would do the cybercriminals’ bidding.
One quite troubling “feature” of that virus: It uses the brute force of computing power to attempt to crack the passwords of the machine being attacked. “That is somewhat never seen before, and I discover it disturbing,” Perry told AFP. He advises people to select better passwords. Mix in numbers, punctuation marks and upper-case letters to make them tougher to deduce. Also, record the passwords in a paper notebook. “No hacker in the world might hack the written page locked away in your office,” he told AFP.
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Best answer:
Respond by notI-REY
For right now i would have to say the vundo trojan(Virtumonde or Virtumondo) has had a pretty good run,and invoked a great deal of misery.
This Conficker worm does seem pretty scary.
The trouble is their are Constantly those persons who will pickup zero-day contagions before the Anti-Virus organizations might provide signatures.
Heuristics come into there own at that time.
Virtualization software appears the supreme way to go,in addition to the firewall and Anti-Virus.
Sandboxie for your browser,or returnil for total system.
Also keep not just Windows patched,but Flash,and other programs that use the internet.
See misc posts re: Online security systems and Mcafee on-line virus scan and removal.
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