Information Protection and Security

We have completed another scan of Rutgers' address space looking for Conficker and found nothing. I'm hoping this means Rutgers will be minimally impacted, but I can't be certain the tool we are using (NMAP) is 100% effective. Additionally, lots of networks and hosts are protected by a firewall and disallow connections from the host we issue the scans with (such as all of RESNET). Nevertheless, it is a good sign that of the couple thousand hosts that we know were successully scanned not one has been identified as being infected.

Wednesday, April 1st is the day the Conficker worm is scheduled to activate. The first thing the worm will do is try to contact it's creators for new instructions, but what those instructions will be is anyone's guess. The worm itself does nothing sinister right now save for continuing to try to infect more systems but the authors have continued to change the code to try and stay ahead of efforts to squash this bug.