calculatedChaos Gaming

I don't know if this is just another hoax or what, but I got this e-mail at work abot 5 min ago and figured I would pass it along to anyone else.


PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT for informational purpose:

For anyone that has caught the news lately or perhaps already know, April 1st of this year comes with an added sense of foreboding and dread, especially if you depend on a Windows based computer on a day-to-day basis. The Conficker Worm is the widest spread computer infection the world has seen; the estimates for computers currently infected with a variant of the Conficker Worm range in the 5 million to 15 million user range. Depending on the variant, the Conficker Worm can make changes to user account lockout policies, disable Windows Services, disable access to websites that host Anti-virus resources and updates, and create massive peer–to-peer connections with other infected PC’s, allowing data to be shared among them. It also attaches itself to Windows processes, and can perform other functions such as collecting user names and passwords.
We advise each of you to make sure your computers are as prepared as possible. Included in this email are links to the Microsoft patches. We would also recommend you share this with your user community and encourage them to update any Anti-Virus software that they have on their home PC’s and suggest running some kind of spy ware removal tool… here is a recommend tool, BitDefender (here is the link to the latest BitDefender tool http://www.bdtools.net/). And as a reminder don’t open emails, e-cards, attachments, or go to web links that you are unfamiliar with.
Windows XP- http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en
Windows Vista- http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en

This is definitely not a hoax. The virus is basically setup to ping any of 100,000+ servers for instructions on what to do. Security people have been unable to kill the virus and the only thing they know for sure is that it is going to ask for new instructions tomorrow.

What they think is going to happen is that whomever is in controll is going to proposition the black market and do whatever the higest bidder wants to do with the virus. Pretty scary stuff I suppose.

If you have any type of virus protection, it shouldn't affect you. I've never been hit with this or any virus/worm every since I've started using Avast! Antivirus.

Same with my AntiVir anti-virus. I figured I would just post it so that people would know. I always like being aware.

That's what is scary about this worm. It disables your antivirus software, windows update etc. and until the last couple days was almost impossible to detect.

WHAT THE FUUUUUUU-

I think I'm staying on my mac on April Fools day, at least then all I have to worry about is the occasional rick roll from one of the people that I subscribed to on youtube.

there is a free AVG antivirus program and a Malwarebytes program that i use and works like a charm. This and the "Habs" bug as i call it have been creepin me out the last 2 days. ive been runnin at least 2 scans a day with both programs.
But as I was reading reports for various sites, confiker has created its own subconfikers. And, just a thought, a subconfiker called "Confiker C" was launched in Feb 20, 2009. This worm had the ability to generate named pipes and would send the website to an unknown person and download it. This might lead into something for steamtourney.tk. But i dont know if that site was up for more than a year since i havent had a steam game for that long. Just throwin out ideas.

If you use Firefox, I suggest you download a plugin called NoScript. It's virtually impossible for you to catch anything nasty from browsing websites because it allows to to pick and choose everything on sites that you want to enable. If you download it you'll see what im talking about - hard to explain.

Just stay off of sketchy sites like 4chan and you will be fine. And stop downloading porn! I use IE and just don't go looking and places that will probably infect me, especially porn sites. Free porn is like bait for getting horny idiots' computers infected.

There's this pr0n site an ex-girlfriend turned me on to....wait a minute, I probably shouldn't be talking about such things...

Viruses always come from porn. If you have spyware you look at too much porn, period :P

one of my colleagues ran across this in this mornings news cruise this morning, hes been following the story. this virus is well designed, and its code is actually maintained via its own p2p network. the AV guys dont even know the full extent of what this thing does, the code its so heavily encrypted.

"Conficker begins stealthy update"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7991422.stm

heres a pretty major study done on the virus' internals (what they could get at).

"Conficker C Analysis"
http://mtc.sri.com/Conficker/addendumC/

and if you run a network, some detection methods if you have a *nix box hooked up to your core net.

"Detecting Conficker"
http://honeynet.org/node/388