Order of the Bath

All the hype about Conficker/Downadup on April 1st was no more than that. It wasn’t a day when you were going to get infected, it was, if you were already infected then that was the day it would become active in whatever it was going to do e.g. spam.

In practice, because of they way it was propagated, home users were less likely to be affected anyway as it used corporate networks, though there was some risk from USB memory sticks. Also, well over half of the worlds affected machines were in areas where they take little notice of licensing and were using cracked copies of Windows.

Anyway, there is quite a simple way to discover if you are affected. Visit this Conficker Eye Chart and follow the instructions, it is very easy. It is not 100% guaranteed because proxy servers can make things seem ok when they are not, but it is a good start. As a second test, go to your anti-virus supplier’s web site. If you can get there and read a sample of the pages then you are almost certainly NOT infected.

This entry was posted on 3 Apr 2009 at 09:31 by Rick and is filed under Security, Technical, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.