Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

This is spreading like wildfire, but from the tests we carried out using an infected USB stick the F-Secure tool to remove the virus does not work. It reports back to say that the virus is not detected, but during our tests when we do the same scan using the Trend Micro tool it gets picked up immediately. Until F-Secure amend their standalone scanner, I would not use it to combat this. More information on F-Secure’s tool is here. I am assuming that F-Secure are not including all variants and they need to update it.

Microsoft has also issued a new Malicious Software Removal Tool, KB article 890830, which is released regularly for removal of many viruses. However, the main one we are interested in is this:

You can deploy this quite easily across your organisation via group policy, Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) or any other third party software/update distribution solutions such as the one from Altiris. So far, the only products that I have encountered which can detect and delete the virus is still McAfee, NOD32 and eTrust. I am not sure about Symantec as I refuse to use a product that grinds your entire system to a halt. No news on Kaspersky either, our purchase of Kaspersky 2009 is redundant until they release a new definition file.

EDIT – McAfee VirusScan Enterprise

This gets better and better, McAfee VirusScan 7.1 DOES NOT detect conficker unfortunately, even with the latest DATs installed. We compared this to our other rig which uses VirusScan 8.5 and that detects and removes successfully. So I would suggest upgrading to the 8.5 version if you use McAfee in your organisation. The engine for 8.5 must have a better heuristic detection method.

Another thing to note is that there are (as far as I know) two versions of this worm, W32.downadup.a and W32.downadup.b. The “b” version has the added bonus of spreading via autorun.inf as described in my previous post, so whatever AV solution you use make sure that it covers both. Sophos will be investigated as a possible solution for some of our rigs, having such a large test environment at my disposal does mean I can test and roll back as many times as I want before we commit.

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Tags: conficker, f-secure, kb890830, McAfee, MSRT, Trend Micro, w32.downadup

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.