The Shadowserver Foundation have produced a set of statistics that detail the number of infections of the Conficker infections per ASN. The statistics for JANET (ASN 786) look promising. Bearing in mind that the large increase in infections coincides with the start of the academic year, and that numbers will start to naturally decrease towards the holiday period, the overall trend still appears to be downward. The numbers are very favorable compared to similarly sized commercial providers.

JANET CSIRT have more information on Conficker, how to detect and investigation infections and protect your network.

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We continue to see a number of suprisingly successful phishing attacks against academic e-mail addresses. The attackers send their targets customised e-mails redirecting them to a professional looking website asking for their e-mail account details.

The current trend is for the website to be hosted with a third party company that provides free web forms to web site authors. The page is usually convincing but the URL is usually questionable. Please make sure that your users know that you will never ask them for their password, and how they can spot the more obvious fraudulent e-mails and URLs.