So by now I’m sure most of you have heard of Cornficker and its variants. Yeah that nasty little annoying worm which reaches out to special servers to get instructions for what to do with itself. The annoying beasty that is causing an uproar similar to the whole Y2K bug. The worm that is unstoppable!
Wait at minute. Unstoppable? Last I saw there was a patch put out by Microsoft back in October which closed the hole Cornficker uses up. What do you mean, “Patches? We don’t need no stinking patches!” Well in this case you might be right.
The problem with Cornficker is really 2 fold. First if you didn’t make sure your machine was patched in a timely fashion, you left yourself open to it. Second if you got hit by it, patching after the fact does nothing to stop it.
We technicians have a role in all of this too. We need to make sure to let not only our clients, but family and friends know when there is a critical patch from Microsoft that must be applied. Yeah that means checking out what patches Microsoft is releasing every month. It is a responsibility that we have to do though, less we have to clean up the messes left behind.
Yeah, its a little preachy of me, but really, its the way we must do things. Oh and as far as Cornficker goes, will the internet melt down? Doubtful. If you have an infected machine, just don’t power it on tomorrow. The virus won’t contact its servers, which will have moved by April 2nd to try and stay ahead of the law. Then try to remove the damn thing.