The Day of Conficker Is Upon Us!

It is March 31st, on the eve of what may one day be known as Conficker day. The more likely possibility? April 1st will continue to be known as April fools day.

I'm actually not sure why we seem so convinced April 1st is doomsday for this thing. It's just when the software (yes, its a program like any other, plays by the same rules ultimatly) starts looking for it's update. Like patch tuesday for worms :) And after that we will have Conficker D. What does that even mean? New patched updated worm ready to start doing new and exciting things we can't predict. Could it start blasting the internet and taking sites offline? Sure could. Will it delete all your data and crash your computer? Possibility, I guess.

But if you look at the programs intent, to infect and control as many computers as possible, making a big splash on the internet with DoS attacks and nuked hard drives is hardly good use of all these reources someone has taken the time to hijack. Some group out there has control over potentially hundered of thousands of machines on the internet, and all the scalabilities that come with cluster computing, at their fingertips. But as far as an all out DoS attack, it is still a pretty insigificant number of machines compared to the entire internet. Might be the odd outage from some excess traffic here and there, or the update mechanisim in Conficker fails and starts spewing data, filling pipes. Anything can happen, but whatever it is, I think it will hardly be a flicker on the network. But this still begs the question, why would someone do that?

I would guess this group is going to want to sell these resources to the highest bidder, but you can bet both the Conficker authors and the person paying the rent check for this army of machines has something much quieter going on, and that is the scary part. We are all so worried about April 1st, when the damage from a worm comprimising thousands of machines has already happened. What we will see come of the Conficker worm isn't nearly as worriesome as what we won't see.