Visual Test to Check Conficker Infection

Visual Test to Check Conficker Infection

Techtree News Staff, Apr 07, 2009 1649 hrs IST

Spot whether your PC is infected

The April Fools Day Special Conficker worm and its variants have been dreaded by computer users across the world for some time now.

Even though it may seem that the virus has been maintaining a low profile for the past few days, security experts warn that the virus is still a threat. In reality, it has already attacked thousands of personal computers in India and nearly 15 million computers globally till date.

So how do you protect your PC from this devastating worm? You can, if you are able to spot whether your PC is infected by it. How do you do that?

Thanks to Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, you can now see if your computer is affected by Conficker with a simple eye test. Stewart came up with a Conficker Eye Chart, which is a simple visual test you can use to evaluate a PC just by surfing to that page and looking at the images. Below the images, there is also a guide on how to interpret the results. It couldn't be simpler!

However, the test doesn't work if you're behind a web proxy.

The worm is programmed to update itself from domains it randomly generates. For the latest version, Conficker C, this amounts to nearly 50,000 domains a day. The virus author needs to use only one of these domains to host the update, thus making tracking nearly impossible.

Use the test to check whether your PC is infected with Conficker and take the necessary remedial measures. To read more on Conficker, click here.