Microsoft Hopes It Has a Winning Hand to Stop Conficker Worm

The folks in Redmond are tired of hearing about the Conficker worm. Although Microsoft issued a patch back in October, Conficker's infected over 9 million PCs and crippled French and British military assets. Redmond's answer: a cool $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Conficker's creators.

And, that's not all Microsoft has up its sleeve.

• Ace number two: it's formed a posse to help stop Conficker in its tracks. Members of the Microsoft posse include antivirus, domain name providers, and research organizations such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), VeriSign, NeuStar, CNNIC, Afilias, Public Internet Registry, Global Domains International, M1D Global, AOL, Symantec, F-Secure, ISC, Georgia Tech, the Shadowserver Foundation, Arbor Networks, and Support Intelligence.
• Ace number three: a special Conficker website that provides more information about the Conficker (aka Downadup), including manual removal tools.

What's the fourth ace in Redmond's hand? You. If you are managing home or office systems that aren't yet protected against Conficker, get busy. Microsoft's Conficker website provides the links and tools you need to protect your PCs, but they don't work unless you use them.

Illustration by the author.