In traditional warfare, as General George S. Patton (wiki) put it “The object of war is not to die for your country; but to get the other /guy/ die for his.”
In this new age of cyber-warfare we lose food, sleep, time and money. Personally, I’d rather lose a few night’s sleep, a weekend, and some cash than an arm, a leg, my sanity, my life, or one of my kids.
I’m inclined to think that “conficker,” aka “downadup” will bad. I know of four law firms in NewYork City that have been hit by viruses in the past week. Two were the conficker virus. The third was not. I don’t know the details on the fourth. Microsoft has offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the people responsible for conficker. Microsoft wouldn’t offer a $250,000 reward for chopped liver.
Here are the details:
- Microsoft (click here)
- New York Times (here)
- Semantec (here)
- Wikipedia (here)
- ZD Net (here)
Advice – if you’re using Windows, Mac, or Linux:
- Change your passwords. The best passwords are comprised of at least 8 symbols, consisting of a mix of letters, numbers or punctuation marks. To make it easy to remember, use “3” for “e” and “1 for ‘I’. Use composite words, then mix ’em up. For example “baseball” could become “Bas3ba11.” And punctuation in the middle always helps. “Bas3-ba11!” Don’t use the same password for your banking that you use for Amazon, Facebook, Flicker, etc.
- Back up all the important data – photos, homework, the Great American Novel you’ve been working on, all the music and video you downloaded, uploaded. And run the backup to a different computer or external hard drive.
- Run “Windows Update,” update your Mac, or bring your Linux box to the current revision level.
- Verify that your anti-virus software is up to date, then run an anti-virus scan.
- If you’re using Microsoft Windows and you can’t run Windows Update, update the anti-virus software, or get to security pages, then your computer is infected.