Conficker: Monster Computer Worm About To Go Live

On April 1, 2009, the world’s largest computer worm will go online creating potentially the most powerful parallel computer in history, harnessing the power of 12 million or more computers captured.  Previous computer hackers have used their enormously powerful bot networks to do such inane things as try to hack captcha’s or send spam.  Hopefully the hacker who created Conficker has no higher ambitions.  Computer security workers say that the creator of Conficker is far ahead of them in technology & ability and they have been completely unable to stop him.  Theoretically, the Conficker worm could be used to bring down major sections of the Internet itself in coordinated DNS attacks in essentially the largest act of cyber warfare ever seen.  Almost every business worldwide is now tied into the internet in some way and the potential for losses runs into the trillions of dollars.  Another potential application is the creation of a dragnet: essentially scraping the personal information of everyone on earth and using it to commit the largest frauds in the history of man.  Hell, maybe the hacker will go live with SkyNet and we will have a bunch of fun Terminators running around soon.  Good thing we still have Arnold around.