The Conficker worm, in an attempt to take the internet community by surprise, has recently activated on an unexpected date and has “phoned home” from infected computers to get some malicious payload of scare ware installed on those computers.

The scare ware is fake anti-virus software that “finds” infections on the infected machine and asks the user to pay $49.95 to get rid of them. I don’t know if the user’s machine is actually infected with the malware that the bogus anti-virus finds before it is detected, or whether the malware program simply lies. – ‘Probably a bit of both. – And you can bet that any installed trojans and spyware that the Conficker distributors find it useful for your computer to stay infected with aren’t detected.

Conficker exploits Windows vulnerabilities that have been patched for a while now. – So if you have Conficker on your machine and it’s working as intended, then you haven’t got the necessary patches from Microsoft.

First we need to be more definite about whether or not your machine is infected. Go here to find out. – It’s fairly self-explanatory. If it appears that your machine is infected, download and run the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool. – That will kill the infection, plus several others if you have them. Now repair/re-download/update your anti-virus software as necessary, and run a manual scan.

In future ensure that the latest patches from Microsoft are applied to your system as and when they are issued. This will avoid your computer becoming infected, and even if it should still become infected, the virus won’t be able to function and will be exterminated by the Malicious Software Removal Tool.