Worldsex Blog

Your PC could very well be infected more than you wish. You see, right now more and more PCs are being infected with a worm named Storm Worm. It mainly comes from things you open in your mail and things you open on not so safe websites.

According to Wikipedia Storm Worm infected thousands of computers (mostly private) in Europe and the United States on Friday, January 19, 2007 using a topical e-mail message with the subject “230 dead as storm batters Europe. But it doesn’t stop there. Those behind the worm seem to build up a huge base of zombie computers just waiting to attack someone somewhere. Most likely large companies, the american goverment or Isreal’s goverment.

InformationWeek writes; the number of zombie computers the Storm worm authors have amassed has skyrocketed in the past two months, says SecureWorks senior researcher Joe Stewart. From the first of January to the end of May, there were 2,815 bots launching Storm attacks. By the end of July, that number had leaped to 1.7 million. “It’s been building with exponential growth,” says Stewart. “It’s one of the largest botnets I’ve ever heard of.”

I know many of you ask yourself “Am I infected?”. It’s very hard to figure out if you got infected if you run your PC without software to detect and remove virus. I know Symantec (Norton) denies it any access from the known versions of Storm Worm. F-secure (who named the worm in the first place) also has quite a bit about the subject.

Wikipedia has a link to MW-Blog. I haven’t tried it yet and I don’t know if I will. You should only begin working with these things if you’re 100% sure what you’re doing. Best thing you can do is to buy a piece of software to protect you PC. I know some of you say “well I have never been infected so why should I?”. If you don’t have software to detect it how can you be sure you’re not infected?

http://www.mcafee.com
http://www.kaspersky.com
http://www.avast.com
http://www.symantec.com (What I use on my PC)
http://housecall65.trendmicro.com/ (Free online scanner)
http://www.pandasecurity.com (Also has a free online scanner)

Anti-virus info from Wikipedia
About.com removal info
SpywareBlaster (I use this to prevent installation of spyware)