Was your PC one of the 9 million? If you were following my advice and updating your Windows operating system on a regular basis, you would have been completely protected. The patch for this exploit came out in October.

You may not even know you’ve been affected. Back in the old days, virus’ and worms were written to be destructive, usually erasing your hard drive or corrupting system files so you couldn’t boot. Now the bad guys only want to use your computer without you knowing. There are keystroke loggers that will record your keystrokes, especially passwords and send them back to their evil headquarters and you won’t even know it until your bank account has been emptied into some offshore account.

You computer might be drafted into a zombie army of computers to perform evil deeds when the bad guys send a command. This is how sites like Amazon and Yahoo can be taken down, by using the processing power of thousands of computers.

If you want to see how this works for good instead of evil check out SETI

SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

It’s the same concept, using processors from several thousand computers as one giant supercomputer.

Back to the bad guys. This worm found it’s way past firewalls and antivirus programs through a bug in Windows XP and Vista.

‘Amazing’ worm attack infects 9 million PCs
Like other security researchers, those from Microsoft have put some of the blame on users slow to patch their PCs. “Either Security Update MS08-067 was not installed at all or was not installed on all the computers,” a pair of security researchers who work at Microsoft said Tuesday.

Microsoft has recommended that Windows users install the emergency update, then run the January edition of the MSRT to scrub the worm from compromised computers.

This time it was found out and can be easily fixed. If you’ve ever had a virus, you know this is usually never the case. Present day virus’ can be embedded so deep in your system (called a rootkit), that an anti-virus program can only tell you that you have one. Then it’s reinstall windows.

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