Potential ‘big bad### botnet’ spreading fast*
The ‘Downadup’ worm is spreading quickly and now infects more than 3.5 million PCs, according to the security company F-Secure.
In a blog post on Wednesday, F-Secure put the total number of infected machines at an estimated 3,521,230 — a rise of more than a million machines over the previous day’s tally…
Wow. A million new infections in one day..
Folks, to read the rest of this article (clipped from ZDNet) by David Meyer and Tom Espiner, click here.
[update 1/19/09: over 8 million now. Here’s the latest (and how that number is arrived at), Calculating the Size of the Downadup Outbreak]
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• About Tech Paul
I am a Retired computer & network technician. I used to think the machines were pretty cool. Now I don’t.
They’re anything but.
I regularly posted how-to’s and tricks & tips and general computing advice here starting in 2007. (Use the Search tool to find answers. But be aware, many are rather dated.) Sometimes I answered (your) specific questions in an article if I believed the answer was generally helpful to “everyone”. All the writing you see was my own, typos and all. There always is/was an implied “IMHO” in what you see here.
Note: You are responsible for using this blog and its content. I am in no way liable for any losses caused by user error, viruses and/or other malware, hardware or software failure, or any other conceivable reason.
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Tech - for Everyone 
Not only can this virus disrupt your PC, since it can disable your ability to connect to software update sites it leaves you vulnerable to even more malware. You need to disable AutoPlay as well as patch your PC.
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Only folks who’ve intentionally turned off automatic updates — and been ignoring them (ahem), need worry about this particular infection — via the Internet.
The preventative patch was released in October. (This is why it was first considered mainly a server issue.. seems that kind of delay in applying patches to critical servers is the norm.)
However, it can travel to network shares, and via USB flash memory devices (thumb drives). Once it’s on the network, it owns the network.
Roger Grimes has an excellent article, which concludes with a call for the corporate world to rethink their patch management strategies (at least, that’s how I read it that section.)
http://weblog.infoworld.com/securityadviser/archives/2009/01/conficker_malwa.html
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