Stop Conficker Worm from Automatically Spreading

March 8, 2009 Computer Safety Tip

The Conficker worm and other similar malware, sneaks its way from computer to andrejs_keys_by_animal_e computer by taking advantage of the Autorun feature in Windows. If Conficker finds removable media (like a USB drive) on a PC it infects, it will find that media in such a way that it will exploit Autorun to attempt to automatically infect a new computer when the drive is connected.

Microsoft has shared instructions for manually disabling Autorun but this is really meant for systems administrators rather than the average person. Recently, Microsoft released a patch and those steps have not even worked correctly, according to US-CERT.

An easier solution, first posted by Nick Brown and then recommended by US-CERT, involves far fewer steps, but you’d still need to copy a few lines of code and create your own script.

The script only works for Windows XP. Also, it’s important to note that if you turn off Autorun, you’ll have to manually find and double-click installation programs and other things that would have been automatically started by Autorun. You might also run into trouble with U3 USB drives. But will block off one of malware’s dirty tricks.