From the Mind of Marc... » Virus Protection

One of Conficker’s purposes revealed….

Marc — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:21:56 +0000

It looks like all that updating Conficker did on April 1st and in the past few days had a reason: to push rogue anti-spyware software. According to several security software vendors, Conficker is dropping a program called SpywareProtect2009 on infected machines. The purpose of rogue anti-spyware programs is to scare users into paying for the software to clean up infections that the software itself has downloaded to the machine. Typically these programs will besiege the user with large pop-up windows proclaiming, in big red letters, that the computer is infected with hundreds of pieces of malware. If you receive any of these so-called warnings, don’t click on any of them. Run your security software (Norton, McAfee, Trend Micro, etc) to remove the threat. You can also go to any of the security vendors’ websites to get free removal tools for Conficker or any of the rogue anti-spyware programs. Check out our previous blog posts here for more information on Conficker and how to check for and remove it.

Downadup = 4/1 (or: Conficker set to do something on April 1)

Marc — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:45:29 +0000

Conficker (also known as Downadup) is a pretty nasty worm that has three known variations (A, B, and most recently C). It gets onto your machine through a Windows security flaw that was patched in October of 2008, and is programmed to call a sequence of control servers for updates and presumably other nasty activities. Recently, Kaspersky Labs, a security software and research company, was able to figure out the list of names the worm would check for updates and teamed with OpenDNS to block these attempts. Now researchers are saying that the worm is programmed to do something on April 1. What that is, they don’t know; they only know that it is set to “call home” on that day. Fortunately, there are many ways to remove the worm if you’ve been infected. And as always, keeping your antivirus and antispyware software up-to-date and installing Windows updates will help protect your machine.

Free scanning tools

Marc — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:27:31 +0000

I was just reading an email from Microsoft promoting a free scanning tool from their OneCare service, so I decided I’d post here about it and also include some links to a couple other scanning tools.

The first time I ran the scanning tool from OneCare, it crashed Internet Explorer. Not a good sign, but it could have something to do with all the other windows I had open at the time. The second time, it finished completely. It took a while to scan, a little over an hour and a half, most likely because it was performing other scans in addition to just a virus and spyware scan (it also scans the registry, temporary files, disk fragmentation, and network security). All in all it seems like a decent tool to use in addition to your existing software. I still wouldn’t reccomend OneCare as your primary security suite because it has gotten very poor reviews; the number one reccomendation is still Norton Internet Security. If you want a full rundown of the latest security suites, check PC Mag’s full review here.

Here are some links to free scanning tools:

TrendMicro’s HouseCall and RUBotted (click on the Free Tools tab)

Panda’s ActiveScan 2.0 (registration required)

Microsoft’s OneCare