The "P" Word? You Know, Privacy & Psecurity.

From the that’s-quite-a-joke-you-got-there-dept: 60 Minutes said that “The Internet is infected“.  Meanwhile, Conficker was getting quite a bit of press in other venues too.  Towards the end of May, Univision interviewed me about the danger it represented.  Many [Windows] computer users waited for the impending doom and then…

…nothing happened. And many had a good laugh.

Except that something important did happen, and quietly too: Conficker began calling home and morphing into something else.  And an interesting homemade diagnostic eyechart was published.  And discussed.

The important thing to remember is that people were warned and had ample opportunity to mitigate their risk – As far back as January 2009, 1 in 3 Windows PCs were still vulnerable to Conficker, a full 80 days after a patch was published by Microsoft.  That means the patch was issued in October of 2008.

Talk about a slow motion train wreck that could have easily been avoided.

Of course, if you’re running Linux or OS X, you probably snickered, felt superior and/or laughed up your sleeve, because you ducked this one.  This time.