Free Microsoft Conficker Worm Scan Tool

Although initial panic about the Conficker worm has come and gone, it's possible that there are still thousands of infected systems, possibly one of your home systems. Refer to this overview from Microsoft about Conficker for more information.


If you're still concerned, I thought it might be a good idea to provide a safe site that you can use to scan your system through a web browser to check your systems.

Why care about a worm that appears to be under control? First, it is still unknown how many systems are/were infected with Conficker and if they've all been patched to address the threat. Second, the worm initially carried no malicious payload, meaning it's sole purpose right now appears to be simply for propagate itself across as many systems as possible. What is still not known are the author(s) intent for the worm.

The conspiracy theorists amongst us believe that the worm, which "phones home" or contacts one or more control systems for instructions periodically, may be activated or loaded with a malicious payload in the future before the industry experts can shutdown it's source.

So, an easy way to ensure that your systems are protected from known incarnations of the worm is to run a check on it's attack vector (or the Windows vulnerability it is known to exploit).

The Windows Live OneCare saftey scanner will check your system and provide information on it's safety, or how to patch your system to prevent infection. Firefox users will need to visit the For Firefox Users page to download a fix to allow the scanner to run under Firefox. To simplify things, we recommend that you visit the Live OneCare site using Internet Explorer and avoid modifying your Firefox configuration. Incidentally, the scanner will not run on pre-release versions of Windows 7 at this time.

Via Microsoft Live OneCare safety scanner