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.

I have a ton of drives spread across my various servers and computers and have more or less standarized on Seagate drives, mainly due to the fact that they’re reasonably priced, perform better then the competition (at least when I’ve tested) and have the best warranty in their class.

Warranties are always up in the air though, they’re only as worthwhile as the company backing the warranty request. I finally had a drive reporting errors, my first in many moons, so I contacted Seagate for warranty.

Starting the process was simple, I used Google to look for Seagate Warranty, supplied the model and serial number, my contact information, put the drive in a box and shipped it off.

Here we are about two weeks later and I have a refurbished drive. According to S.M.A.R.T. the drive is brand new, although it’s not impossible for Seagate to reset the hours-of-operation counter before shipping the drive out.

So thanks Seagate for standing by your products! I’m ordering two more drives and you can get that they too will be Seagate.

Check out this Power Supply Calculator from Outer Vision Extreme

Imagine my surprise:

Yup, I’m actually very nearly maxing out my gigabit network. I honestly didn’t even believe it was possible to push anywhere near this much bandwidth through my gear. Cool.

According to Microsoft, there are several mitigating Factors:

Ohh well, you win some, you lose some.