Just a heads up about a pretty nasty little worm that has just hit our site over in Algeria. It has taken down several of our servers, and most desktops are infected, too.
Apparently it's propagating throughout the world in anticipation of playing a very nasty practical joke on many people on April 1. Microsoft have offered a $250,000 reward for finding the author and turning him in:
http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2009/03/27/update-on-conficker-d.aspx
Our IT people are trying to zap it now, but not having much luck as it has quite a sophisticated regeneration mechanism and it seems to spring back to life after they think they've killed it.
For the moment, our proxy server is still up, so we still have an Internet connection, however our mail server is down, as well as several of the servers that do data harvesting from our plant process control system.
If any of you are involved in IT or process control systems, I would strongly recommend you be extra vigilant over the next few days, and make sure you have the latest patches installed for your Windows machines and AV software. Our Sophos AV software detected its arrival, but couldn't stop it from propagating. Whoopee.
We think we may have been infected by a trainee (university student) who simply connected an already infected USB memory stick to our system.
As usual, it's only affecting Windows machines, so those of you who are on Macs or Linux boxes needn't worry......
Apparently it's propagating throughout the world in anticipation of playing a very nasty practical joke on many people on April 1. Microsoft have offered a $250,000 reward for finding the author and turning him in:
http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2009/03/27/update-on-conficker-d.aspx
Our IT people are trying to zap it now, but not having much luck as it has quite a sophisticated regeneration mechanism and it seems to spring back to life after they think they've killed it.
For the moment, our proxy server is still up, so we still have an Internet connection, however our mail server is down, as well as several of the servers that do data harvesting from our plant process control system.
If any of you are involved in IT or process control systems, I would strongly recommend you be extra vigilant over the next few days, and make sure you have the latest patches installed for your Windows machines and AV software. Our Sophos AV software detected its arrival, but couldn't stop it from propagating. Whoopee.
We think we may have been infected by a trainee (university student) who simply connected an already infected USB memory stick to our system.
As usual, it's only affecting Windows machines, so those of you who are on Macs or Linux boxes needn't worry......