Real or Imagined Threats?

Matthew Greensmith — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:02:49 +0000

Some news reports out today are leading the public to believe that the April 1st threat of Conficker has been a whole lot of nothing. Yes, the worm had a trigger date to take over machines on the 1st, and for machines that weren’t protected, that takeover happened. I’m currently working with a friend of my son’s on one of the computers in her household that ended up being infected with Conficker. For most people, because their machines were patched and their virus programs up to date, no problems were noted.

So of course follows lots of commentary about how everything was blown out of proportion, ala Y2K.

I completely disagree. In my mind, it is because of the publicity and news reports that the Conficker worm had less purchase and effect overall. People were paying attention, and they were making sure their machines were clean. If they didn’t know how, they tagged a geek who did, and made sure they were ready for this particular threat. Just because we were prepared for the threat doesn’t mean it was any less of a threat. There are still machines out there that are infected and will need to be addressed, but I believe the threat is a whole lot lower mainly because people were aware and doing what the needed to do to keep from being infected.

I know, sometimes to the rest of the world we geeks are running around hollaring about viruses and worms and oh-my-gosh-it’s-the-end-of-the-world, but the fact is, if we didn’t take these things seriously, there’d be even worse threats and worse infections turning machines into zombies for us.

This weekend I imagine I’ll spend a couple of hours trying to come up with a fix for my son’s friend’s machine. I’d rather have talked to a few people about the worm and how they should be protecting themselves, than spending my weekends and evenings fixing problems that could have been avoided with a little prevention.

Of course, on this blog, I’m preaching to the choir, aren’t I?

Geek News Central » Conficker

Real or Imagined Threats?

GNC-2009-03-31 #464 Back in Honolulu