by Diana Coman

Created on: September 02, 2009

Conficker appeared in 2008 and rapidly made the headlines all over the world infecting more than 6 million computers in only 4 days according to IBNlive. More than one year after its birth, the Conficker virus is less of a media star, but not less menacing to Windows computers all around the world. Only this May (2009), The Register reported it to infect as much as

50,000 new PCs a day. So if you own a Windows PC, you might still want to make sure that it is Cornficker free. And once you are at it, you might also want to make sure that you have all the defenses up and running against this nasty virus. But how do you know in the first place whether Conficker is not already hiding on your own computer? And what to do to protect your computer from it?

Upon infecting a new system, Conficker tries first to protect itself by preventing the system from accessing security websites. But this also exposes the virus. All you have to do is to try to access from your Windows computer security related websites such as antivirus sites or Windows update sites. Moreover, if your computer is infected, the following services will be disabled and you will not be able to start them: Windows Security Center Service, Windows Defender, Error Reporting Service, Windows Error Reporting Service, Windows Update Auto Update Service. If you are not able to login with some user accounts with higher/administrator rights although you are sure that the username and password are correct, you might also be quite sure that Conficker resides on your computer.

If you've found Conficker on your system, all you can do is to get a removal tool from the Internet, run it, and hope for all the best. As Conficker will probably not allow your computer to connect to the sites that have such tools, you should use another, healthy computer to download such tool and burn it on a CD/DVD to use on the infected computer. Some tools that remove Conficker can be found at BitDefender, Sophos and Trend Micro.

If your computer is healthy, congratulations! But if it is healthy, it does not necessarily mean that it is safe! For your own safety and peace of mind, don't forget to download and install the Conficker patch from Microsoft. And as a rule of thumb, always keep your operating system, firewall and antivirus up to date by installing all their upgrades and security patches.

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