The Media Should Leave Conficker Alone

I am sick and tired of the media using scare tactics on ignorant people in this nation. Within the last week, the Conficker Worm has gotten so much media attention that people were actually comparing this to what we thought was going to happen when 1999 turned into 2000 at midnight. The worm was set to receive some kind of updates today, and because such a big deal was made of it, what it got was minimal. The writers of this were most likely not wanting this insane publicity right now. Once we all forget about it, and we will, they will do whatever it is they wanted to do.

Real information: Most of the time the Conficker Worm exploits a vulnerability in Windows that was patched in October. The worm was most likely written by reverse engineering the Microsoft patch. If you update your computer, you are most likely fine. It also moves using autorun when you plug in an infected USB flash drive. Don't let random people plug anything into your computer.

With the amount of machines they have now it will not be nearly as bad as most news outlets are stating. Most estimates put the botnet they now control at a little over 2 million computers. That is extremely large for a botnet and they could probably perform denial of service attacks on some major corporations or the government (I can only hope for that one). They are not going to knock out the entire power grid (at least not until Obama implements his smart grid, then maybe they can) or take the entire internet offline. Stop the scare tactics.