sometimes you are walking down the street or sitting on a bus/tram/train/car/plane and the strangest things go through your head that in some cases may feel profound to you or perhaps (more commonly with me) downright stupid. You continue on your journey and the thoughts have gone, usually for ever. I decided to invest in an iPhone recently and one of the things that I realised immediately is that I no longer have to loose some of these musings, so here they are!
Conficker - a virus/work
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You may have heard in the past days of a virus that has many a sysadmin wetting themselves in panic and with good cause. Some say the hackers have yet to activate the payload of the conficker virus which is spreading through low security networks, memory sticks, and PCs without current security updates. Some 9.5 million pc's are suspected to be affected and as F-Secure's chief research officer, Mikko Hypponen said:
"Total infections appear to be peaking. That said, a full count is hard, because we also don't know how many machines are being cleaned. But we estimate there are still more than 9m infected PCs world wide.
It is scary thinking about how much control they [a hacker] could have over all these computers. They would have access to millions of machines with full administrator rights.
But they haven't done that yet, maybe they're scared. That's good news. But there is also the scenario that someone else figures out how to activate this worm. That is a worrying prospect."
Below is information regarding the virus from Avira the free anti virus software site. Microsoft has done a good job of releasing a patch to home computers that have chosen to accept the automatic update capabiliy of windows, the real problem may be with corporate sysadmins who have yet to instal the appropriate patches. Of course, it is said that as the virus is not fully understood, the patches may not do much good. Let's wait and see. I guess this is a good time to be using a Linux or a mac, huh!?
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