News Report #1

“Downadup virus exposes millions of PCs to hijack”
Barry Nield, CNN.com
1/16/2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/ptech/01/16/virus.downadup/index.html?eref=rss_tech

The article “Downadup virus exposes millions of PCs to hijack” is about a new sleeper virus known as Downadup or Conficker worm, which is rapidly spreading to computers throughout the world as a bug. ‘ “On Tuesday there were 2.5 million, on Wednesday 3.5 million and today [Friday], eight million, “[Mikko Hypponen] told CNN. “It’s getting worse, not better.” ’ F-secure, an anti-virus firm, believe the Downadup worm is coming from a group of people in Ukraine, who are most likely engineers. The Downadup worm spreads by attacking computers that are already infected through Microsoft Windows. Once the worm has come through the infected computer it scans the network looking for other computers to infect. Computers that are vulnerable to this virus are laptops or desktops that have not installed a patch from Microsoft known as MS08-067. At this time the Downadup worm is mainly targeting corporate networks. The purpose of the worm is unknown, but in the future this worm could be a virus that tries to steal personal or financial information.

In my opinion, this virus is very scary for the simple fact that the objective of the worm is unknown. What makes this Downadup worm horrible is that F-secure is having a hard time trying to block out this virus from entering networks period. All it takes is one infected computer to crash thousands of computers. So, imagine having to fix thousands of infected computers, and a single computer amongst them still being infected leaving the network and other computers vulnerable to the worm. The virus has already become a major threat to Europe, the United States, and Asia. Can you visualize almost all the computers in the world crashing and it taking years to try to clean the networks up? The good thing about this is that it is not the first major computer virus of the world, so hopeful they will find some way to take care of this problem, like they have always done with past viruses. What it seems to boil down to is every computer needs to have this Microsoft program (MS08-067) downloaded to it to avoid catching this Downadup worm.