Yesterday we offered up a guide to protecting your Windows PC from the Conficker worm, set to start doing ... something today. Free net service OpenDNS is another option for anyone concerned about today's not-so-funny happening.
Why? OpenDNS has been tracking the Conficker worm and blocking the sites it keeps reaching out to for its nefarious further instructions. As OpenDNS' David Ulevitch puts it:
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.
In other words, even if Conficker has made it onto your PC, or a PC somewhere in your house/office, OpenDNS will likely stop the worm from contacting the site that would tell it what to do.
If you're still using your Road Runner/Comcast/Verizon DNS pre-sets on your home router, consider that OpenDNS can also speed up your surfing by allowing keyboard shortcuts from any system, work as a parental filter, and prevent you from seeing so many of those "no such site, but here's a whole bunch of ads!" parking pages. It's free to use and set up; here's a detailed guide for home networks.