Global Virus Spread

Globally Connected, in the Worst Way

More than one million, and possibly as many as ten million, personal computers have been infected with the Conficker virus. The virus has claimed victims from the German military, computer networks in the British and French Air Forces and teaching hospitals in England. Conficker is particularly virulent because once it spreads it disables infected computers from being cleaned out, while searching nearby serves to break passwords and spread to any shared drives. It also replicates itself, like a DNA strand, onto any hardware device connected to a USB port, such as digital cameras, music players or key drives. When those infected devices are then connected to another computer, they infect that machine and so the virus spreads. This is apparently the means by which the computer networks of the French Navy were infected.

What makes Conficker so devastating is that on a daily basis, each computer infected with Conficker attempts to connect to 250 Internet domains for further instructions on destructive activities to carry out. Each day these 250 domains change, confounding efforts of security experts to shut them down. In effect, Conficker has created a massive botnet that could orchestrate spam attacks or cyber extortion or cyber militia attacks.

Generally, it is a bad idea to use external devices such as key drives for data storage; such devices can be lost or stolen. Now add another reason to the list: they can be used to transmit lethal viruses from one computer to another. Some businesses have their IT staff disable USB ports to prevent employees from using key drives. This may be an idea that small business owners should consider out of an abundance of caution.