A virus is lurking in personal computers worldwide.

You may have read about the Conficker virus infection and shrugged the news off as just additional hype.   Maybe the entire thing is as overblown as the Y2K hype. You may even be correct.

But on the off chance that you’re not and someone’s computer has one of the variants of this virus, you would be wise to back up today and check the backups tomorrow.  Most importantly, you should recognize that if you do have an infection that your backup will also be infected.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been in any organization where at least one computer (usually the one the boss totes around) isn’t properly backed up.   On the off chance that the Conficker threat is real and will do something to that computer, or worse, to your network, you need to wrestle that computer away during a conference call or tonight or something.

If you are the boss, you need to make sure everything is backed up.  You have emails, budgets, financials and all sorts of data that exist in one place.

Chicken Little virus warnings are part of our culture now.  There are 670 articles on Google News dealing with this potential threat.   The details are unimportant except for security professionals who regularly deal with this sort of issue.  As a small business professional, back up your most important information.  We should all always do that, but just like the communities in North Dakota rallied to save their homes this week, you should be rallying now to make sure your data is protected.

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