A colleague has been struggling with very strange behavior on his PC that may be the result of this terrible virus. It's estimated that as many as one-third of all Windows machines may be vulnerable with "the worst yet to come," as some are reporting. See John Markoff's informative "Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide" and Geek Doctor's post today, "The Conficker Virus," where John Halamka explains how his medical system is handling the danger represented by this unusually pernicious crawler.
Back in the day, we profiled what had been to date perhaps the worst computer worm story in history in The Age of the Network. What was called "the Internet worm" began its swift and evil journey across the then-primitive electronic nervous system of the world. While it was terrible during its time, it also provides a powerful lesson in how networks come together.
November 2, 1988, lives in infamy in Internet history. At 5 PM that Tuesday, a "worm," a computer program that propagates copies of itself on certain types of operation systems, was released on the Internet, ultimately reaching 4000 of them [ed. note: at that time, a large number on the grid!]. Within 36 hours, the worm had, for all intents and purposes, been stopped by a self-organizing, completely volunteer network of computer people across the U.S. It's a great networking story...MORE