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March 16, 2009

Various reports have started trickling in that Bit Defender has released a vaccination tool to delete and kill the notorious Conficker virus that infected some nine million Windows computers in the last three months.

Details are sketchy for now, but the worm (also known as Down-A-Dup) exploits a security hole in the Windows Server service used by Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008. It spreads primarily through a buffer overflow vulnerability in the Windows Server Service where it disables the operating system update service, security center, including Windows Defender and error reporting back to Microsoft.

Security experts claim the worm is the worst infection to date, second to the SQL slammer worm that devastated the Internet in 2003.

Malware analyst Vlad Valceanu said the worm is difficult to remove because it contains a built-in update service.

BitDefender has said its removal tool will delete all versions of Downadup and will not be detected by the virus.

“BitDefender Labs has been seeing an increase in worms, like Downadup, that have a built-in mathematical algorithm, generating strings based on the current date,” Valceanu said in a written statement.

“The worms then produce a fixed number of domain names on a daily basis and check them for updates."

“This makes it easy for malware writers to upgrade a worm or give it a new payload, as they only have to register one of the domains and then upload the files.”

You can download the fix from www.downadup.org.

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Source: BitDefender.

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