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more:TechSpot NewsThere was a lot of hype drummed up in recent days about the most recent variant of the Conficker worm, which was supposed to deliver some sort of nasty payload today.
Yup, the frenzy is whipped up by the NAV companies and sniping Fanboy's in the media. I woke up on tuesday and laughed when CNNHN reported it as though skynet was about be unleashed.
"Due to lots of research it seems we got pranked pretty bad! There is a conficker virus yes but it's been long since deactivated and gotten rid off, nothing to worry about if you took care of it LAST YEAR, and it was around october"
It now has different variations ... it's not gone and dead. All the warnings are real and they are about "playing it safe".
Not just over-hyped but irresponsibly over-hyped. My mother-in-law didn't know if she should even turn on her computer yesterday. That may sound ridiculous to everyone around here (including me). I eventually talked her off the cyber ledge. But most people in this world don't want to bother with even the bare minimum of how a computer works, they don't have the time, don't care, etc. They just want to send email, buy something off amazon or whatever. Honestly, that's perfectly understandable because everything is not for everybody.
But when you've got every TV news person, every radio news spot, every newspaper, every magazine, every blog saying for 48 hours in a row what a world disaster this stupid conficker thing will be, that's not news. It's lazy @#$%! morons shouting from the mountaintops a bunch of alarmist crap.
Not saying conficker was not a threat. Just saying you had to really dig deep to find someone who knows what the hell they're talking about.
The Conficker worm today has begun to phone home for instructions but has done little else. Conficker was programmed to today begin actively visiting 500 out of 50,000 randomly generated web addresses to receive new instructions on how to behave.
Conficker D-Day Arrives; Worm Phones Home (Quietly) - PC World
Its definitely good news that it hasn't done anything yet, but I personally don't think it was overhyped at all. In fact I wondered if people weren't warned enough, as none of my friends new about it until I let them no about it. And this is coming from someone who is tech saavy, and rarely falls over the hype of things, and is the complete opposite of a conspiracy theorist, lol.
I don't think the hyping of the worm was a result of what security experts expected it to do, but rather what it could have done. It's about the risk. I mean anyone remember the ILOVEYOU virus? That caused massive damage because people were unprotected. Conficker didn't do anything, but it very well had the capability to do massive damage.
And quite frankly, what does it matter if it didn't do anything yesterday? Correct me if I'm mistaken but April 1st was only the day it started to recieve instructions again. That doesn't mean it had to do it yesterday, it can begin to recieve its actual instructions anytime afterwards. With the intelligence this piece of malware was coded, I think it would be pretty stupid of them to send the instructions when everyone anticipated it to.
I personally don't think anything will happen, but from what I know, this is the most potentially dangerous virus we've had in a long time.
When someone is afraid to turn on their computer, that is overhyped. Does that mean ignore warnings? No. But I worked in daily journalism for two decades. Trust me, these people are not the best and brightest.
Conficker was supposed to unleash its terror on millions of P.C's across the globe
Internet Worm 'Time Bomb' Set For April 1
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