Related to SupportOnClick ?

Could the recent update to conficker be related to the Cold Calling Spyware scam and the way some people were unable to shutdown etc & then got contacted by Supportonclick?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/10/supportonclick_scareware_scam/

Re: Oh Noes

"Apparently, 1 in 5 people in the world are Chinese. And there are 5 people in my family, so it must be one of them. It's either my mum or my dad. Or my older brother Colin. Or my younger brother Ho-Cha-Chu. But I think it's Colin."

- Tommy Cooper

oh no!!!

How do I protect my Mac?

Ah yes, I don't. I pay the "Apple Tax" that ensures that chavs don't buy into high priced gear, leaving us with a nice minority OS that no one bothers trying to hack.

Seriously guys, how much more money do you guys have to spend on security over the "Apple Tax"?

RE: the sub head

No actually I'm not scared now. Wasn't scared when the hyped machine started rolling on this and wont be scared tomorrow. Come on guys, do we really need to keep re hashing this and giving this worm more press than it deserves. Not to mention trying to cause a panic? It's really getting very tiresome.

@ Justin Clements

Its called security. You should try it sometime. And by minority OSes, do you mean say, Vista? Its about as popular as a herpes sore.

Funny, if we Mac users represent the top ten percent of big spenders, you would think we would be a high level target, platinum card numbers and such. "Sadly, looking into my checking account this is not the case"

If you can't figure out why NT is less secure than Darwin Unix, you are simply trolling, a Microsoft fudster, or just a little slow. And only the third rates any sympathy.

Three Macs, Well two Macs and a Hackintosh EEE PC , security budget ZERO, infections ZERO, hassle ZERO. I don't know where you live, but if you look at US LAPTOP sales. We are well over ten percent. In new sales something a bit under one in three, We are not such a minority anymore.

So is parliament still infected?

Just asking.

ISP's still can't get round to letting the most annoying group of their users why people are finding them *so* annoying.

mine's not !

There is no linux version yet - maybe its coming like chrome ?

Still Cheaper and who cares?

Justin, I pay $39.95 a year for a 3 user license to protect my Windows machines. Still way cheaper than a MAC. But in case everyone hasn't noticed, most of the infected machines are ones running pirate copies of XP in places like China. These machines don't pass Windows Genuine Advantage scrutiny and thus the needed patch won't install. Conficker for the most part didn't infect the large numbers of PC's in North America and Western Europe that its authors had hoped for. With the patch widely deployed and anti-virus companies hot on Conficker's ass I doubt that it will spread much more in the regions just mentioned. So if Conficker's masters want to infect Chinese, Indian, and Russian computers running non-genuine copies of XP with a English version of the rogue SpywareProtect2009 who cares? Have fun with that guys.

RE: Still Cheaper and who cares?

>>if Conficker's masters want to infect Chinese, Indian, and Russian computers running non-genuine copies of XP with a English version of the rogue SpywareProtect2009 who cares?

You'll care when they create the largest botnet ever known, then flood the net with unprecented volumes of spam and DDOS attacks.

Or maybe you won't.

A couple of points

"Data from enterprise users of Sophos's Endpoint Assessment Test, which checks the state of Windows PC patching and anti-virus protection, suggest 11 per cent of users have failed to install the MS08-067 patch that guards against the vulnerability exploited by Conficker."

These result will be somewhat skewed. People who are clued up enough to care about security will patch regularly and therefore probably won't use something like the endpoint assessment test. People who aren't clued up at all probably wouldn't use it either. So the figures apply to a fairly small subset of users.

Secondly and more importantly the MS08-067 only guards against one of conficker's attack vectors. Too much publicity is given to this particular attack vector, I've found plenty of infected computers which had the patch applied long before they were infected, but the infection came via the autorun feature. The victims have all thought they were protected because they had applied the patch. Please don't enforce the belief that the patch alone will protect against conficker.

Scared yet? Eh? Eh?

Nope.

Eh? Eh?

Is your headline writer Canadian? He/she's adopted our national "eh"!