John Markoff has this article in the New York Times. There really hasn’t been a self replicating attack on Windows for at least a couple of years.
Opening paragraphs say:
The Conficker worm is scheduled to activate on April 1, and the unanswered question is: Will it prove to be the world’s biggest April Fool’s joke or is it the information age equivalent of Herman Kahn’s legendary 1962 treatise about nuclear war, “Thinking About the Unthinkable”?Conficker is a program that is spread by exploiting several weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Various versions of the software have spread widely around the globe since October, mostly outside the United States because there are more computers overseas running unpatched, pirated Windows. (The program does not infect Macintosh or Linux-based computers.)
As he says, the big question what happens on April 1, will it be an April Fool’s joke or should we really worry.
Read the full article here: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/the-conficker-worm-april-fools-joke-or-unthinkable-disaster/?ref=technology
here.
