All's Quiet On The Conficker FrontAll's Quiet On The Conficker Front

It's 6:30 a.m. on April Fool's Day here in the U.K., and so far we've not seen any evidence of the Conficker worm "melting your computer," turning off the nation's air defenses, or dialing the local pizza company. My guess is that -- as widely predicted by the security vendors -- Conficker and April 1st was mostly about hype rather than havoc.Nevertheless, Conficker remains out there on a lot of computers. If you haven't already done so, download one of the free Conficker removal tools available from your favorite security vendor. (Be careful that you get it from a legitimate site because some hackers are taking advantage of the pandemonium to hide their malware as an anti-Conficker.)

In addition, use this opportunity to review your security in other ways, too. For instance, do you have the latest security patches in place? Have you implemented a policy to control the use of USB drives, or at least prevented AutoRun from allowing code to automatically execute when USB drives are inserted in Windows? Have you toughened your passwords, and made sure that users aren't using dictionary words or dumb numerical sequences?

If you're smart, then you can turn Conficker day into a day to better secure your computer systems for the future.

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.