Dear Creative Consultants Customer,
The Conficker virus has received a great deal of media attention, recently. Conficker is a virus that could inhibit your ability to receive Microsoft and other security product updates. As a valued Creative Consultants Group client, we would like to inform you what Creative Consultants Group has been and is doing to protect your network from this, and all viruses. We are also providing you with additional information concerning corrective steps that you can use to ensure all your servers, pc’s and network are protected from this virus.
All customers serviced by Creative Consultants Group’s that are using our supported Antivirus products and that have been configured/maintained by Creative Consultants Group, will already have their software configured to receive antivirus definitions every two hours throughout the day. The software is also configured to automatically update anytime the software detects new definitions are available for download.
For customers with our TotalCareSM service, we have monitoring in place to let us know if a machine is having problems receiving updates. If a machine is having issues with a virus definition update, a ticket is generated for the Creative Consultants Group Engineer to alert them to the problem and allow us to correct the issue, thus allowing the virus definitions to update.
Customers without TotalCareSM or other service contracts offered by Creative, who are running either Trend Micro or Symantec Corporate Edition or Symantec Endpoint virus protection, will need to validate that their machines are receiving regular virus definitions. Please contact Creative Consultants Group to obtain assistance in validating that your machines are staying current.
The vulnerability affected by this virus was fixed in Microsoft Patch KB958644, which was released for installation on October 15, 2008. If you are not a contract customer of Creative Consultants Group, you will need to verify that Automatic Updates are properly configured for all workstations and servers. For our Total Care and contract customers, Creative Consultants Groups will review all servers to insure they have this patch installed. If it is not already installed on any servers we service, we will take steps to correct this. If any of your servers have not been patched, Creative Consultants Group will be emailing you to notify you which devices may still require this patch.
Microsoft releases a Malicious Software Removal Tool once a month. Creative Consultants Group has approved these updates for release immediately, specifically, the latest version, KB890830. These supplement your antivirus software. The Malicious Software Removal Tool from Microsoft is NOT required to remove Conficker or any other viruses as long as an antivirus solution is in place.
Users can verify whether their machine is infected or not by attempting to browse to any of the following websites.
If you are able to successfully navigate to any of these websites you are NOT infected as Conficker is designed to block access to these sites on infected machines.
These steps should help to alleviate any questions or concerns that your institution has in regards to the Conficker virus. Creative Consultants Group has performed all possible steps to prevent any infection to your network. If you have any questions or require any additional information, please feel free to contact us at info@creativeconsultants.net or your Account Executive.
Thank you,
Creative Consultants Group, Inc.