Anyone else watching what a media shitstorm Conflicker has turned into?

As if we don’t have enough FUD already, we have some genius at ABC news advising how to make your computer less secure.

If you don’t purchase the software you could also save your files to an external hard drive and be sure turn off any automatic updates until this super worm is killed.

Wow, that’s special. I’m wondering if whoever the technical adviser was for that article isn’t on Conflicker’s payroll? See, Conflicker spreads in three ways:

External drives (USB flash drives, external hard drives)
By exploiting bugs that were already fixed before Conflicker was released and deployed by Microsoft through Automatic Updates..
Weak passwords across your LAN.

So the correct course of action is to do the exact opposite of what ABC suggests: Turn on automatic updates, make sure you’re up to date right now, then scan your external hard drives before trusting them.

And then of course there is this little gem:

“Well the best thing a customer can do is purchase a Norton 360, what it will do is give you complete virus protection it also spyware and adware..in addition it gives you two gigabytes of online backup so you could put your files on a backup server”, said Luke Rider, Manager of Staples.

Because when I think “security consultant”, the first thing I do is go to my nearest Staples store and ask for the manager.