Slashdot Mirror
Years-Old Conficker Worm Still a Threat
RedEaredSlider writes "The Conficker worm is still a threat, even though it is more than two years old and nobody has used it in a botnet attack yet. The problem is that so many machines are infected (largely because many don't realize it) and it's such a flexible piece of malware."
The Average User is still a threat in his path to ignore one and all security measures.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
The college (part of a larger university, but separate for IT purposes) I work at in Beijing has a choice between two different free (Chinese produced) antivirus/antimalware products. The one that detects Conficker is on the computers of the people designated "sysadmins" (discussion for another day as to what qualifies as a sysadmin at this school) and any computer I am required to use as a function of my work (not including my personal notebook, which the admins aren't allowed near). The software that doesn't detect Conficker (or quite a few other 2+ year old baddies, in spite of being "up to date") is on everyone else' computer. As best as I can determine, this is to give the appearance of justifying the positions of the 5 sysadmins needed to support less than 50 computers (not including the lab computers which require minimal support because they suck so badly the students would rather go to an internet cafe to do their work, if they can't afford to use their own computers). Someone let me know when an opening at Tsinghua U. is available.