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More than a year after doomsday reports hinted that the Conficker worm would bring down the Internet, one-in-10 Windows PCs still have not been patched to plug the hole the worm wriggles through, new data shows. And 25 of every 1,000 systems are currently infected with the worm. According to Qualys, a security risk and compliance management provider, about 10% of the hundreds of thousands of Windows systems it monitors for customers have not yet applied Microsoft's MS08-067 security update. MS08-067, an out-of-band release that shipped in October 2008, patched a bug in the service Windows uses to connect to...

Friday, May 1, 2009 Summarizing Zero Day's Posts for April The following is a brief summary of all of my posts at ZDNet's Zero Day for April. You can also go through previous summaries for March, February, January, December, November, October, September, August and July, as well as subscribe to my personal RSS feed or Zero Day's main feed. Notable articles include: Google's CAPTCHA experiment and the human factor; Conficker's estimated economic cost? $9.1 billion and Twitter hit by multiple variants of XSS worm.

A computer worm that has alarmed security experts around the world has crawled into hundreds of medical devices at dozens of hospitals in the United States and other countries, according to technologists monitoring the threat. The worm, known as "Conficker," has not harmed any patients, they say, but it poses a potential threat to hospital operations. "A few weeks ago, we discovered medical devices, MRI machines, infected with Conficker," said Marcus Sachs, director of the Internet Storm Center, an early warning system for Internet threats that is operated by the SANS Institute.