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Sydney Morning Herald: Conficker Leads to “Internet Meltdown Threat”

Welding



Summary: Conficker can still take entire nations off-line, warn experts; another new threat called Clampi affects only Windows

AUSTRALIA seriously pondered banning (from the Internet) Microsoft Windows PCs that are not properly secured or like hundreds of millions of other Windows PCs, are outside the control of the intended user.



Conficker is far from dead [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] and the Australian press warns about it again.

Internet meltdown threat: Conficker worm refuses to turn



[...]

The worm, first detected in November last year, spreads rapidly to computers through a flaw in the Windows operating system.

Infected machines are co-opted into a "botnet" army, which can be controlled and used by the hackers to launch unprecedented cyber attacks.


There is another newly-developing plague called Clampi (mentioned yesterday). It affects only Windows PCs and the following new article makes it even more explicit:

Only computers running various Windows operating systems are affected. The virus cannot install itself on Linux based systems.


This ought to remind people that Linux/UNIX PCs are inherently more secure.

"Anyone wonder why the Microsoft SQL server is called the sequel server? Is that because no matter what version it's at there's always going to be a sequel needed to fix the major bugs and security flaws in the last version?"

--Unknown

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