Conficker STILL Raging Irish PC's

ESET's ThreatSense Reports Shocking 28,3% of Infections in Ireland are by Conficker Worm

Anti-virus and security company, ESET Ireland, has reported that infections of the Conficker Worm has effectively doubled since the company reported a high of 15% just two months ago, three times the global rate.

Urban Schrott, Security Consultant at ESET Ireland said: "We'd hoped the figures in May was the worst Conficker infection Ireland was going to suffer, but were shocked when June's rate was reported at 28.3%, which put Ireland up with the highest infected countries, such as Ukraine and Russia throughout 2009."

Currently in Europe, only Slovenia had a higher infection rate, with 29.17%, while the global rate of Conficker infections is 9.79%. This reveals an alarming negligence in Irish computer users about patching and updating their operating system, as a simple Microsoft patch can prevent most cases of Conficker infection. Judging by the soaring infection rate, Irish computer users also seem to be very unaware of most other computer security practices.

In view of all the publicity Conficker has received (take a look on IrishDev.com) and its extensive use of a vulnerability that's been remediable for so many months, we'd expect Conficker infections to be in decline by now if people were taking these common sense precautions, unfortunately that's not the case.

While ESET has effective detection for Conficker, it's important for end users to ensure that their systems are updated with the Microsoft patch, which has been available since the third quarter of 2008, so as to avoid other threats using the same vulnerability. It's possible to avoid most Conficker infection risks generically, by practicing "safe hex": keep up-to-date with system patches, disable Autorun, and don't use unsecured shared folders.

View the full ESET ThreatSense Report for June 2010 is available here.

Visit Reflex - ESET Distributor in Ireland

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