Saturday, March 28, 2009

An Ounce of Prevention

I was reminded about this April 1 rumor when I read Kim Komando this AM. She writes: "Conficker is the latest horror show, and it’s coming your way. It certainly sounds scary. An estimated 12 million computers have been infected. The virus is currently dormant. But it’s programmed to do something on April 1.

Does anyone know what the something is? Nope. Conficker has essentially built a massive and powerful botnet. But nobody knows what this army of infected computers will do. It could spread spam or cyberterrorism. Or it could be an elaborate prank (activating on April Fool’s Day)."

The ounce of prevention you can take is to manually download the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool and run  a FULL SCAN. On my machine this morning it ran for almost 2 and a half hours.  You can download it here:


http://www.microsoft.com/security/malwareremove/default.mspx


The tool found no problems on my machine. I also use the 8 free tools listed two posts below in the Einstein post, so I did not expect there to be any problems.

I strongly recommend you do the same: use my "Big 8" recommended free tools and download the above program from Microsoft. Do it today and run it today. Let it run to completion. I hope no problems are found on your machine, but if they are, and if you need help, give me a call at 802-899-4541.


An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!




Here are a couple of screen shots from my run this AM:

msrt1.JPG



msrt2.JPG