So, the much hyped (CNN, FOX, Post, even Microsoft offered up a bounty!) Conficker proverbial ‘D-day’ has come and has nearly passed for much of the world without so much as a blip on the radar; though the US did go to DEFCON 3 this morning.  You can’t say the industry wasn’t prepared however.  It was all hands on deck for many organizations.  We even had our own Conficker working group to deal with this apocalyptic horror.  In the end…dud.

The threat du jour as it were or even the threat of the year turned out to be just another April Fool’s computer threat.   I can’t figure it out, is it the large media outlets or is it the malware writers that have a love affair with April 1.  Perhaps a little of both.  There is an interesting exercise in Google there.

Like most things of this nature, once the pop culture media has elevated a topic to the top of the hype bubble, at least enough to ensure sufficient AD revenue, the story is either stale or so far out of the context of reality only those who the aliens at Hulu are after would be willing to entertain the story.  So by extension, pop media = Hulu = aliens?  Interesting.

I think the security industry as a whole is largely to blame for some of this.  Like an adolescent child, we’ve grown accustom to resorting to brute force tactics (re: tantrums) to get attention for the cause.  Now don’t get me wrong, the security profession as a whole has advanced to well beyond a respectable field but we continue to employ the FUD principle to justify our means.  Scare tactics like these are only useful for so long.  Eventually, the general populous will catch on and cry foul while these industry pundits continue to cry “WOLF!”   If I had the choice between having to justify funding or use scare tactics to ‘invoke’ attention, I choose the former.

Cudo’s the virus writers though, he/she/they did one hell of a job invoking a response; great diversionary tactic.  I wonder how much money was actually spent on “battleing Conficker” considering the invested human capital when we should have been focusing practical solutions that would have prevented the worm to begin with.