DHS develops software to fight Conficker worm

The Department of Homeland Security took swift action on Monday, releasing a DHS-developed detection tool to scan computers infected by the Conficker worm.

The department's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) team created worm-scanning software for federal and state government agencies, commercial vendors, and critical infrastructure owners. The software is free.

"Our experts at US-CERT are working around the clock to increase our capabilities to address the cyber risk to our nation's critical networks and systems, both from this threat and all others," US-CERT director Mischel Kwon said.

The Conficker worm is scheduled to receive a code update today (April 1) that will make it harder to stop. According to security researches, any machines infected will scan between 500 and 500,000 websites for that updated information.

For more on this worm:
- check out this InformationWeek article