Things You Need to Remember About DOWNAD/Conficker

A year after the much-hyped April 1st D-day for DOWNAD/Conficker, the world can only hope that it has heard the last of the notorious network worm. As we have seen, DOWNAD variants have effectively infected millions of systems and paralyzed networks in just a matter of months. And while there seems to be very little news on DOWNAD recently, users are still advised to adhere to best computing practices and to implement necessary preventive measures.
As a timely reminder of the extent of this network worm’s capabilities, here is a rundown of the important things we need to remember about DOWNAD.

DOWNAD can infect an entire network through a single machine. In most cases, all it takes is a single unpatched system for the worm to infect an entire network. It is thus crucial that each and every system is updated with the appropriate patch for the Microsoft OS vulnerability exploited by each threat.
DOWNAD can attack in more ways than one. There are several ways by which a system—and consequently an entire network—can get infected by DOWNAD. It may arrive via a malicious URL, a spammed message, or a removable drive. WORM_DOWNAD.AD is currently the only variant capable of propagating via removable drives. Unfortunately, this means that a system does not even need to have an Internet or a (continue reading...)