Conficker virus, aka W32.downadup
Saturday, January 10th, 2009This little gem has been plagueing corporations all over the world, thanks to a Ukranian virus writer. Something to do for those cold winter nights I suppose when you have no gas.
It acts as a botnet of sorts and once infected the machine turns into a HTTP server to spread it further. Another method of transportation is via USB drives with autorun enabled. Signs of infection include hundreds of connections to port 445 (SMB), do a netstat -on at the command prompt. Also access to admin shares are lost and other file shares could be affected.
Removal
First thing is to patch your machine with this security patch from MS: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 – Critical (KB958644)
Secondly, update your anti-virus software with the latest definitions. For a standalone removal tool, go to Trend Micro and download with the latest definition files:
Sysclean scan and removal
Latest Control Pattern file
Spyware detection and cleanup
Run sysclean.com once all files are extracted, and it will scan the current machine.
Funnily enough, we decided to go to PCWorld and buy the latest Kaspersky 2009 AV software for our standalone PCs. To our surprise it did not detect the virus at all, forums suggest the Kaspersky ruskies are working on a solution for detection and removal. Also our AV for the corporate network, eTrust by Computer Associates also did not initially detect it until a policy update was applied. According to the techs at CA, it was classed as low risk and not critical. Obviously CA were caught napping when the bulletin was released in October. Nod32 by Eset finds it quite happily without creating too much fuss, same goes for McAfee if you have the latest dats.
Information on the virus worm by McAfee
Even though they have marked this as low risk, it can be very disruptive. Losing access to file servers containing critical data for everyday operations isn’t exactly productive. I have also found the hammering of port 445 will slow your network down to a crawl as it will do this on every subnet you are connected to and try to do this for external IP addresses also.
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