By now you’ve likely heard the speculation that April 1, April Fools Day, is the date Conficker kicks into action. And unfortunately this isn’t a joke. The virus, also known as Downadup, leverages a known vulnerability in the Windows OS and has the potential to do some serious damage. Some estimates for number of machines infected so far are as high as 15 million. The Internet is abuzz with news about the virus and predictions about what it will do.

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As your IT Support company, we’re in a unique and advantageous position to help keep our users safe. Fivenines and OpenDNS has kept our users safe from Conficker for the past several months by blocking the domains it uses to phone home. (We’ve seen lots of you start using our service to protect your networks from the worm.)
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The latest variant of Conficker is now churning through 50,000 domains per day in an attempt to thwart blocking attempts. Consider this: at any given time we have filters that hold well over 1,000,000 domains (when you combine our phishing and domain tagging filters). 50,000 domains a day isn’t going to rock the boat.
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What is OpenDNS

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OpenDNS is a company that offers an alternate way for your computer to get “directions” on the Internet as well as control exactly what is allowed to be accessed by your home or business network. This is one of those tools that has value for some and creates privacy concerns for others (more on that later).
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DNS stands for Domain Name System and is what translates our requests in plain English into the numeric system known as IP (Internet Protocol) addresses that the Internet works on.
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In other words, early on in the development of the Internet, someone really smart realized that it would be much easier for us humans to remember names than numbers to access the information that we sought.
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So here’s our update:

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OpenDNS will continue to identify the domains, all 50,000, and block them from resolving for all OpenDNS users. This means even if the virus has penetrated machines on your network, its rendered useless because it cannot connect back to the botnet. If you want to disinfect your computer we recommend you call us with any suspicious activity reports.
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If you’re already using OpenDNS, you’re all set. We’re protecting you automatically. If you’re not yet, simply email us or call on 0844 870 0059.