Conficker Virus – Set to Attack on April 1st, 2009

Have you heard of the Conficker virus?  It is set to wreak havoc on computers on April 1st, 2009.  What will it do? No idea, but I know it has infected PCs like the plague.  Will it steal your data?  Erase your hard drive?  Turn your machine into a spam bot?  We’ll see.

To make sure you don’t have the Conficker virus already, you can download various free scanners to scrub your hard drive for the virus signature. Using Google will help you find the programs.  If you can’t visit eset.com or any of the other anti-virus websites, hunches are you are infected.

Per lifehacker, you can protect yourself by:

How Do I Stay Safe?

Staying safe from this, and many other viruses and worms, requires a combination of keeping your computer updated and using anti-virus software. Here’s a couple of quick tips to follow:

• Make sure your system is fully patched using Windows Update, and update MS08-067 has been applied.
• Make sure your anti-virus is fully updated, enabled, and you’ve run a full scan.
• Make sure you are using strong passwords (see our guide to choosing great passwords).
• Disable the AutoPlay feature—which Conficker uses to infect systems.
• Make sure your firewall is enabled when you are on untrusted networks.
• Make sure your data is backed up—if you aren’t sure what to use, see our five best Windows backup tools.

For more information, visit yahoo news or lifehacker.