Fergie's Tech Blog

Fears of a Conficker Meltdown Greatly Exaggerated

Robert McMillan writes on PC World:

Worries that the notorious Conficker worm will somehow rise up and devastate the Internet on April 1 are misplaced, security experts said Friday.

Conficker is thought to have infected more than 10 million PCs worldwide, and researchers estimate that several million of these machines remain infected. If the criminals who created the network wanted to, they could use this network to launch a very powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against other computers on the Internet.

April 1 is the day that the worm is set to change the way it updates itself, moving to a system that is much harder to combat, but most security experts say that this will have little effect on most computer users' lives.

That hype will probably intensify when the U.S. TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes airs a report Sunday on Conficker, entitled "The Internet is Infected."

posted by Fergie @ 3/27/2009 04:25:00 PM