Conficker Worm: How to Tell if Your PC is Infected

The new Conficker virus has been making a lot of headlines this past week. Conficker infects your PC through a security hole in Microsoft Windows. Although the hole was fixed by Microsoft in October, if your PC does not get automatic updates, you may be infected.

Conficker, like several other virus programs, doesn't disable anti-virus software outright. Instead it blocks access to your anti-virus company's website so that victim's software can't get automatic updates.

There are many ways to determine if your computer has become infected by Conficker. The easiest is to browse the Internet to sites like update.microsoft.com or security.symantec.com. If you can reach those websites and otherwise browse the web normally, than your computer is not infected. However, if you find you can't reach these sites, you may be infected with Conficker or a similar virus.

Removing Conficker is where things get tricky.

Since your computer won't be able to reach many of the websites that contain Conficker removal tools you'll need to get access to a friend's computer to download one. A list of free Conficker removal programs is available at www.confickerworkinggroup.org.

Once you've downloaded a removal tool, copy it a disk, a run it on your PC. In some cases, if the removal tool has Conficker in its name, you may need to rename it because Conficker will block programs from running that contain the word Conficker in the title.