April 1st comes… are you prepared?

No, you don't have to be prepared to enjoy making treats to your friends and family (in some English-speaking countries this is the way they celebrate the Fool's Day).

I'm talking about preparedness about the upcoming explosion of the Conficker.D virus, (yes, or Downadup.C or other names). This is maybe the most hard-to-kill computer virus in history so far.

For those of you, my fellow readers, that are technical enough, I want to explain why this variant of the virus is so dangerous. Those of you that are not so technical… you can skip a couple paragraphs and understand it…

Conficker.D has two ways of infection: Direct connections to other infected machines (yes, a P2P mechanism) and connections through the Internet to different domains. In the previous incarnations of the virus, it uses some more basic algorithms, but this version randomly selects 500 domains out of a set of 50,000 where it can get the infection and additional malware, making it hard to stop.

The virus version D will do it on April 1st and so. The risk is enormous if you think about the possibilities of DoS and other scenarios that it could make happen, however, the statistics about infection with this variant of the virus are not precisely cause of alarm. (There are however big numbers of infection with the previous variants, according to several blogs accounting for 10 million Internet-connected infected machines)

How do I get protected?

First: Update. It is very advisable to update your security software (antivirus, antispyware, and so on) on a frequent basis. This means at least daily. Also, your operating system and applications should be updated (In this particular case, the virus propagates itself mainly by exploiting a vulnerability in Windows which was covered with last October's updates)

Second: Use. You should use your antivirus… it sounds like a joke, but I've met lots of people (and not only home users) who disable the antivirus because they think that it lowers the performance of their computers. Normally, antivirus programs are self-configured to stop infections on the fly, update themselves and do scheduled scans of your disks, but if you disable it's functionality, it is worthless. Other people just have their antivirus installed as it came out-of-the-box. Well: most antivirus software that comes pre-installed in computers today are demonstration versions that will only work for some weeks or months… Is yours working?

Third: Do not trust. Specially if think you know something about computer security, do not install software that comes from the non-trusted sites in the Internet or from unknown sources. Try to get always to the developer's website or to the developer's defined distribution channel in order to make downloads.

Also, do not trust in weak passwords, secure ANY password you manage (shared folder passwords, account passwords and other) as the virus also transmits it's infection through folders that are published in networks with inexistent or commonly used passwords. (This also applies to other infections that can come to you via Messenger, e-mail, and other means).

Can you put it easier for me?

Yes, please UPDATE your Windows installation in http://www.update.microsoft.com, specifically with the patch mentioned in this Security Bulletin http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-067.mspx. Also, UPDATE and MAKE SURE that your antivirus and security software is running before, ON, and AFTER April 1st.

Go for it! Don't let it become the owner of your computer!