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A Quick And Easy Way To Tell If You're Infected With Conficker

Even though April 1st is now history, you would be foolish to think the Conficker worm is no longer a problem. It's still out there, still causing a nuisance, and could be instructed to activate a payload whenever the hackers choose. So what you want is a quick and easy way to tell if you might be infected, right?

Apr 02, 2009 | 07:13 AM | 

By Graham Cluley
Dark Reading
Even though April 1st is now history, you would be foolish to think the Conficker worm is no longer a problem. It's still out there, still causing a nuisance, and could be instructed to activate a payload whenever the hackers choose. So what you want is a quick and easy way to tell if you might be infected, right?Well, the good news is that besides the myriad of free Conficker removal tools that antivirus companies have come up with, a guy named Joe has come up with something beautiful, simple, and neat that doesn't involve you installing any software at all!

Joe Stewart is the director of malware research at SecureWorks, and he has created a neat Web page that instantly and visually tells you if you're likely to be infected by the Conficker worm.

It works by presenting a page of Website logos. Because the Webpage drags down images of Websites that are blocked by the Conficker worm (to prevent you from visiting computer security Websites, for instance), it can diagnose the likelihood of your PC being infected.

Of course, you can't check all of your computers with Joe's method. Given that Conficker has network- and USB-spreading capabilities, a lot of PCs will be infected that don't have an Internet connection. And it's always possible that a new strain of Conficker comes out that his page doesn't know about, or that other connectivity problems could give you a false impression of the status of your PC.

Even so, it's genius in that way that the most wonderfully simple things always are. I love it.

Graham Cluley is senior technology consultant at Sophos, and has been working in the computer security field since the early 1990s. When he's not updating his other blog on the Sophos website you can find him on Twitter at @gcluley. Special to Dark Reading.



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