As we do each month, ESET has released its monthly threat report. As you might expect, there were a lot of Conficker detections out there. There were also almost as many detections for autorun threats that are not Conficker. In other words, if you have disabled autorun, then you protect against a lot more than just Conficker. Conficker also takes advantage of a vulnerability for which Microsoft issued a patch last year. There are lots of threats that exploit vulnerabilities, so if you aren’t keeping your operating system and applications patched, then there is a bunch more than Conficker to worry about.
A little bit about the “detections”. This does not mean infections, but can. ESET users who opt in to ThreatSense automatically upload statistics about what has been detected, regardless of whether it was blocked or newly found. With Conficker the detections are going to be users who were protected from Conficker attacks, as well as brand new users who were cleaning their machines.
Personally, Conficker is far less worrying to me than whatever is out there trying to exploit the vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat. Adobe has recommended disabling JavaScript in their products. If they had shipped Acrobat in a proper configuration, with JavaScript disabled, there would be far less impact from their recurring vulnerabilities.
Give Adobe time. One day they’ll catch up to where Microsoft was with security back in 2003.
You can read the entire report at Global Threat Report, April 2009
Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education
