I kept telling everyone to worry about being secure, not about Conficker. Some people listen, some don’t. So what happened over about the past 24 hours?
According to ESET’s ThreatSense.Net, by about 2 PM GMT on April 1st, of the top 20 threats encountered by our users in the past 24 hours, four out of five of them were NOT Conficker. About 16.17% of the threats were online game password stealing threats. Another 21.5% were threats that were not Conficker and were trying to use Autorun to infect computers. 9.72% of the threats were something we call Win32/Agent, which tries to steal data from your computer. Yes, 80% of the risk was not Conficker but 99% of the attention was on Conficker. Does that make sense to you? Can you imagine crossing the street and ignoring 4 out of 5 cars? Do you think you’ll live long?
If you are taking the proper precautions to protect against those other threats, then Conficker is not an issue. Dedicated Conficker detection tools are really pretty silly to the rational mind. If you go to the doctor with typhoid, malaria, smallpox, and measles, do you really want the doctor to only check to see if you have the flu? You’d sue for malpractice, so why be as negligent with your computer?
One other thing….. The version of Conficker that has the April 1 trigger does not appear to spread. It appears to only affect machines that are already infected. More on that in a later blog.
If you’re scanning for Conficker instead of for all malware then that is the real April fool’s joke!
Hype is free, why buy it?
Randy Abrams
