How to clean and rid your computer of the Conficker worm

Posted by k-mix on August-31-2009 one Commented

“Conficker“ is a computer worm that targets the Microsoft Windows operating system its also know for its aliases “kido”, “downup” and “downadup.” According to the New York Times, the Conficker worm now controls more than five million computers in more than 200 countries – business, government and home computers alike. The worm takes advantage of the windows network service vulnerability to be able to link them to a virtual computer that can be controlled remotely by its authors, it is said to have used a combination of advanced “malware” techniques which made it almost impossible to counter.

Now for the main topic, How to clean and rid your computer of the nasty Conficker worm. Actually as I said before the worm targets the windows operating system and this alone so its a good news to all Linux users out there but I guess not for long, because there’s a possibility that the authors are already designing a new version solely for the Linux operating system, but that’s another issue. So to rid your computer of the Conficker you can use this two easiest methods.

First you can run the microsoft software named Malicious Software Removal tool, its a stand-alone binary provided by microsoft that helps clean your computer of malicious software particularly the “Win32/Conficker” worm family.

You can download the MSRT from the Microsoft Update site.

Second, download and install the Windows XP service pack 3 but make sure you have service pack 1a or service pack 2 installed prior to service pack 3 installation. After installation don’t restart your computer yet but instead proceed to windows update and install the latest windows patch this way you are very sure you have the latest microsoft software and to prevent it from coming back.

You can download the latest Windows XP service pack from the Microsoft Download Center.

So, let the Conficker worm termination begin.