April Fool’s Day joke or a serious threat to your computer? At the moment no one really knows whether the Conficker worm is a serious threat to the world’s computer networks or a sick joke.

The Conficker worm has been around for a little while and its designers (the bad guys) have developed several versions. The good guys (is there such a thing?) have tried to reverse engineer the code and discovered some of the features that could make it a serious threat.

Thanks in part to a quarter-million-dollar bounty on the head of the writer of the worm, offered by Microsoft, security researchers are aggressively digging into the worm’s code as they attempt to engineer a cure or find the writer before the deadline. What’s known so far is that on April 1, all infected computers will come under the control of a master machine located somewhere across the web, at which point anything’s possible. Will the zombie machines become denial of service attack pawns, steal personal information, wipe hard drives, or simply manifest more traditional malware pop-ups and extortion-like come-ons designed to sell you phony security software? No one knows.  (Yahoo!Tech)

Some sources are saying that home computers are at a lesser risk than network machines because home users have firewalls and sit behind hardware routers. In theory this is true but in practice home users often disable their firewalls in order to use P2P networks and torrent services. Home users often have small networks which are shared with laptops and other mobile devices. And, the Conficker variants are often shared via the humble USB key – which we all happily insert into any computer going.

Good news though! Computer worms, trojans and viruses are nothing new – and neither is the method of protection. Here is my list of ways to protect your Windows computers from nasties.

1. Microsoft Windows Update is your friend – head over to Windows update and install everything that it says that you need. This particular security issue was identified last year so an up to date machine is at a lower risk

2. Antivirus products help scan incoming data, assess for virus threats and alert you to their dangers- make sure that yours is up to date and running (Conficker can disable AV products)

3. Antispyware products identify trojans and worms and help protect against the threats that they represent – again update and scan

4. Your firewall is there to serve a purpose – don’t disable it – and don’t believe your kids when they say that everyone uses Limewire, etc to get files …

Still worried?

Microsoft offer a free online scanning service (you must use Internet Explorer to access it). Trend Micro offer the same service as do Panda Security.

For the geeks – who are comfortable editting the registry – disable USB autorun

and …

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